Adey Nyamathi, the founding dean of the UCI Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, crowns a stellar career this year by achieving the status of “Living Legend,” the American Academy of Nursing’s highest honor. The Academy’s Living Legend designation is granted to a small number of fellows each year in recognition of “extraordinary contributions to the nursing profession, sustained over the course of their careers.”
As dean of our school (2017-21), Nyamathi explicitly emphasized social, cultural and disciplinary diversity as she increased faculty and PhD student numbers, simultaneously building research infrastructure and support. Part of her legacy is therefore a faculty with an impressively broad research portfolio that has attracted an exponential increase in research grant income.
Nyamathi’s own body of work has focused on improving the life and health outcomes of some of society’s most disadvantaged, vulnerable,and stigmatized people:in the US, homeless and substance-using adults and youth at risk for HIV/AIDS, TB and Hepatitis infections; in India,women in rural communities living with HIV.
From the very start of her research career, Nyamathi’s approach embodied the fundamental combination of compassion and practicality that is unique to nursing. “When the HIV epidemic started, I saw the vulnerability of people experiencing homelessness and put the two together,” she recalls. “No one else had really done that.”
Four decades on, her multidisciplinary, culturally sensitive studies have had widespread, measurable impact on the vulnerable populations she works with, and indeed on government policy. “‘Coping and adjustment’ – that was the subject of my PhD dissertation,” she says. “My focus has always been on health promotion and prevention. Even if you’re already HIV infected, how can you make the best choices? And how do we deliver healthcare to people who won’t necessarily be able to come to a clinic – that’s what we’re changing now.”
A native New Yorker, after gaining her PhD at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, Nyamathi spent the bulk of her career at UCLA, working often with international partners. Her highly successful founding deanship of the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing was an unexpected new direction that capped a thoroughly valuable and effective career.
