Dr. Melissa Aselage, who joined the DUSON faculty in July, 2011 earned a BSN (1996) and then an MSN in the Family Nurse Practitioner specialty (2000) at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington (UNCW) School of Nursing. From 2005 to 2011, she served as a full-time lecturer at the UNCW School of Nursing while maintaining a clinical practice as an FNP in geriatric primary care and nursing home settings. In 2011, she received the UNCW SON Faculty of the Year Award. She is board certified as both a Family Nurse Practitioner and a Gerontological Registered Nurse.
In collaboration with UNCW-SON, the American the Association of Colleges of Nursing, Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing, and New York University College of Nursing, Dr. Aselage developed a series of nine modules in podcast format to deliver education in geriatric health care to baccalaureate nursing students. These GNEC Gerontological Nursing Education podcasts, which are based on AACN’s Older Adults: Recommended Baccalaureate Competencies and Curricular Guidelines for Geriatric Nursing Care, are available on the Internet and have been accessed more than 2,700 times by users in 16 countries. Dr. Aselage is now serving as Curriculum Consultant for the John A. Hartford Foundation’s Geropsychiatric Nursing Collaborative, and will work with the University of Oklahoma College of Nursing to develop and enhance geropsychiatric nursing content across programs.
Dr. Aselage is a 2009-2011 John A. Hartford Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity Scholar. She completed her PhD in nursing and a Post-Master’s Certificate in nurse education at the Medical University of South Carolina College of Nursing in August 2011. Her dissertation, which focused on alleviating mealtime difficulties in older adults with dementia, received Distinguished Dissertation Award from the 2011 Southern Research Nursing Society/Aging Research Interest Group.
