PhD student receives National Black Nurses Association research scholarship

Jade Montanez Chatman, Ph.D. student at the University of Louisville School of Nursing, has received a national scholarship supporting her efforts to increase diversity in the nursing workforce.

The National Black Nurses Association awarded Montanez Chatman the Lynn Edwards Research Scholarship, and she will be honored at a ceremony Aug. 4 during the organization’s annual conference in St. Louis. The scholarship is sponsored by Linda Burnes-Bolton, past president of the National Black Nurses Association, and named in honor of her mother.

“This award recognizes the potential I have to make an important contribution to improving the health of our community and will help me develop into a nurse leader,” Montanez Chatman said.

While working as a floor nurse at several hospitals, Montanez Chatman saw that culturally-sensitive nursing care was lacking.

Increasing diversity in the nursing workforce will improve the profession’s ability to serve vulnerable and minority populations using culturally and socially-appropriate prevention strategies to improve health outcomes, she said.

Montanez Chatman is piloting a research project to identify and describe cultural, social and scholastic factors influential to a post-secondary nursing program as perceived by a sample of underserved and minority students in a high school pre-nursing program. The findings will serve as a basis for an intervention study focused on high school students interested in nursing, which will be her dissertation. 

As the first UofL Health and Social Justice Scholar from the School of Nursing, Montanez Chatman helped launch a diversity summit in 2017 for minority high school students interested in health professions. The event has grown to include undergraduate students, providing them information and tools to succeed in professional and graduate school admissions processes.

Earlier this year, Montanez Chatman earned a scholarship from Jonas Philanthropies, an initiative aimed at curbing the national nursing faculty shortage by supporting doctoral students with leadership development and networking opportunities.