Tolu O. Oyesanya, PhD, RN, assistant professor, has been with the Duke University School of Nursing since 2018 and teaches in the PhD Program.

In May, she received the Outstanding PhD Faculty Award and the Early Career Scientist Award during the School’s annual awards ceremony and a Graduate Mentor of the Year award during the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture’s annual Abele Honors ceremony. In August, she was awarded the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s 2020-2021 Novice Faculty Excellence in Didactic Teaching Award.

Oyesanya’s research focuses on improving the health and wellbeing of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and their families across the treatment continuum. Her recent work focuses on developing and testing interventions to improve the TBI transition from hospital to home.

Oyesanya’s research interests also include: post-acute care, care coordination, transitional care, patient/family experience, self- and family-management, provider perceptions, chronic illnesses and neurological rehabilitation.

She actively authors and co-authors research articles within her interests. Since 2020, articles that Oyesanya’s authored and contributed to were released that address:

• Transitional care interventions for patients hospitalized with acute conditions;
• Transition process from acute hospital care to home for patients with TBI and their families;
• Regional differences in rehabilitation outcomes among adult patients with moderate-to-severe TBI who received care at an inpatient rehabilitation facility;
• Assessment of psychometric properties of the Perceptions of Brain Injury Survey;
• Criteria acute care interdisciplinary providers use to select discharge destination for patients with TBI;
• Efficacy of a pre-discharge, medication management intervention for rehabilitation patients with spinal cord injuries (SCIs) and families of patients with SCIs or acquired brain injuries .

In 2020, she and her team received a NIH/NICHD award to further explore the topic of the process of patients with TBI transferring from the hospital to the home. The grant’s start date was February 2020.

Oyesanya earned her BSN, MSN and PhD in Nursing from University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Brain Injury Research at Shepherd Center in Atlanta.