Mark Lazenby, PhD, RN, FAAN
Dean and Professor
Welcome to Humanitas, the new biannual magazine of the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing.
As the second ever dean of the University of California’s youngest nursing school, I was drawn to take up this role a year ago by the scale of ambition I encountered at this small but mighty organization. Nursing is a profession fueled by the human desire to help, to protect and restore the most vulnerable in our society, and to care for every one of us when we ourselves are vulnerable. At the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, the determination of faculty, staff, and students to tackle issues of health equity and injustice, including climate and racial injustice, epitomize, for me, the very heart of our shared profession. The title of our magazine, Humanitas, reflects the scale of ambition that drew me here.
In this inaugural issue, we have thrown wide our doors to introduce some of the faculty, students, colleagues and alumni associated with the school, now located in a new, purpose-built home on campus in Irvine. I hope you will enjoy hearing their many voices and reading about some of the important and forward-looking work they are doing: using informatics to bring the power of data to bear on the provision of nursing care; working with local communities to tailor culturally appropriate care for sick children at home; deriving new and better ways of gaining experience for each new, and greatly needed, generation of nurses.
I hope you will find in each example a little splinter of light in what, as is so frequently expressed these days, are dark times for our profession, and for far too many of our fellow citizens in the United States. For the power of nursing has always been to shed light in darkness, and there has never been a time when that light-giving power was not needed – for nurses themselves, and for all those whom we care for.
Come join us – we’re very happy to meet you.
