Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk is Vice President for Health Promotion, University Chief Wellness Officer, Professor and Dean of the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University (OSU), and Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at OSU’s College of Medicine. She is a nationally/internationally recognized expert and researcher in evidence-based practice (EBP), intervention research, child & adolescent mental health, and health & wellness, and is a frequent keynote speaker at national/international conferences on these topics. Dr. Melnyk has led the EBP movement in nursing across the U.S. for the past two decades, and has consulted with hundreds of healthcare systems and academic institutions throughout the nation and globe on how to improve healthcare quality and population health outcomes through EBP. Her record as principal investigator includes over 33 million dollars of sponsored funding from federal agencies and foundations. She is an editor of five books and over 315 publications, including two American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Awards. She is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Nursing, the National Academies of Practice, and the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. She served a four-year term on the United States Preventive Services Task Force and the National Institutes of Health National Advisory Council for Nursing Research. Dr. Melnyk is currently a member of the National Quality Forum’s Behavioral Health Steering Committee and the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Clinician Wellbeing. She also serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Worldviews on Evidence-based Nursing. Dr. Melnyk has received numerous national and international awards, including the inaugural NIH/NINR Director’s Distinguished Lectureship Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculty, the Loretta Ford Award from the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, the Nancy Sharpe Cutting-Edge Award by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, and the 2018 American Association of Critical-Care Nurses Pioneering Spirit Award. She also has been twice named an Edge Runner by the American Academy of Nursing and was inducted into Sigma Theta Tau International’s Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame.
Dr. Melnyk is the Founder and Executive Director of the new Helene Fuld Health Trust National Institute for Evidence-based Practice in Nursing & Healthcare, which is housed at The Ohio State University College of Nursing. Dr. Melnyk founded the National Interprofessional Education and Practice Collaborative to advance the Department of Health and Human Services’ Million Hearts® initiative to prevent one million heart attacks and strokes by 2017, which now has over 150 participating academic institutions and organizations throughout the U.S. She also created and chaired the first three National Summits on Building Healthy Academic Communities and founded the National Consortium for Building Healthy Academic Communities, a collaborative organization to improve population health in the nation’s institutions of higher learning, for which she served as its first president.