Message from the Dean: DUSON Welcomes New Faculty This Summer
I am very please to announce three new faculty who will join Duke University School of Nursing on July 1, 2020.
Brandon Knettel, Ph.D. will be a member of the Clinical Health Systems and Analytics Division (3). Dr. Knettel is a psychologist and behavioral health scientist specializing in research that examines and addresses the social determinants of health and wellbeing. This includes efforts at stigma reduction, improving healthcare engagement, and building capacity for mental health treatment in underserved settings and populations, both in the United States and across multiple global sites. The emphasis of his current work is to develop a counseling intervention to address mental health challenges, including depression and suicidal thoughts, and to improve care engagement among people newly diagnosed with HIV in Tanzania. Brandon is funded by a Fogerty grant to support his work in Tanzania this year and recently submitted a K award through DUSON. He will also be partially funded by the DGHI when he joins DUSON and will be teaching a course/year that aligns with his area of expertise.
Prior to coming to DUSON, Dr. Knettel was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke Global Health Institute, where he worked with Drs. Melissa Watt and Kathy Sikkema on NIH-funded projects aimed at providing mental health treatment and reducing stigma among women living with HIV in Tanzania and South Africa. He also supported the work of Dr. Gita Suneja examining the dual impact of a cancer diagnosis among people previously diagnosed with HIV in North Carolina. Most recently, as a VECD Fogarty Global Health Fellow, he completed a one-year project in Moshi, Tanzania to develop a training program for community health workers supporting HIV treatment.
Dr. Knettel earned his doctorate in Counseling Psychology from Lehigh University, where he conducted research aimed at understanding geographical variation in explanations about the causes of mental illness. He has also completed research examining the value of community-based interventions to promote mental health among U.S. refugee populations, as well as evaluations of UNICEF-sponsored task-shifting programs for health education in Haiti and Papua New Guinea. Dr. Knettel completed his postdoctoral clinical training at Duke Integrative Medicine and is a licensed psychologist in the state of North Carolina.
Allison A. Lewinski, PhD, MPH, RN will also be a member of Division 3, Clinical Health Systems and Analytics. Dr. Lewinski completed her postdoctoral fellowship in health services research at the Durham Center of Innovation to Accelerate Discovery and Practice Transformation at the Durham VA. She completed her PhD in Nursing at DUSON, a Master of Public Health at University of Michigan, a BS at Michigan State University, and a BSN at Maryville University in St. Louis.
Dr. Lewinski is a health services researcher with a focus on eHealth interventions and chronic illness self-management. Her work sits at the intersection of precision medicine and population health. Her interest in health services and nursing research, specifically in developing and implementing sustainable interventions to improve health outcomes, is an extension of her experiences in public health and nursing. She is also interested in examining intervention implementation and adaptation as a means to understand how, why, when, and for what populations and settings interventions work.
Dr. Lewinski has a full-time appointment at the VA which she assumed this past fall. She recently received a career development award at the VA that examines the association of diabetes distress and related factors using quantitative and qualitative methods in order to develop a novel, nurse-led intervention to improve self-management in Veterans with type 2 diabetes. Allison will be submitting federal grants through DUSON, working with other researchers her at DUSON and teach a health policy course section once a year.
Carolina “Callie” Tennyson, DNP, ACNP-BC, AACC was recently a candidate in our AG-AC NP faculty recruitment and will now be a member of the Healthcare in Adult Populations Division (2). Dr. Tennyson received her BSN from East Carolina University and MSN in Acute Care from DUSON and completed her DNP at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Tennyson’s clinical focus is in cardiothoracic and cardiac critical care specializing in advanced heart failure, ventricular assist devices, and heart transplant. With extensive experience in cardiac critical care and cardiothoracic surgical intensive care, she currently works with the inpatient advanced heart failure services at Duke University Hospital. She has lectured for the American Association of Nurse Practitioners and the American College of Cardiology on acute heart failure and hemodynamic topics.
Callie is well known at DUSON as both an alumna and clinical instructor in the MSN program’s Acute Care NP program. She is enthusiastic about training and mentoring the next generations of acute care nurse practitioners.