Travis Named New CNHS Dean

Provost Peter Stearns has announced that Shirley Travis, the D.W. Covard Distinguished Professor of Nursing at the College of Health and Human Services, University of North Carolina–Charlotte, has been selected as the dean of the College of Nursing and Health Science (CNHS). Travis will begin her new job on January 1, 2005.

A gerontologist with expertise in the issues of long-term care of older adults, Travis also taught at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, where she held the Parry Chair in Gerontological Nursing. Her research and publications focus on long-term care and the patterns of care that individuals and their family caregivers require over time. She has written or cowritten more than 70 articles, book chapters, and reports on aging and long-term care.

Travis received her bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing from Georgia State University and her doctoral degree in gerontology and family studies from Virginia Tech. In addition to a number of state and national health care committee appointments, she recently served as president of the National Gerontological Nurses Association.

She is a fellow of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education and the Clinical Medicine Section of the Gerontological Society of America. In 1997, she was appointed to a national advisory committee charged with establishing accreditation criteria for adult day services organizations in the United States and Canada.