Celebrating Academic-Practice Research Fellows
Ann Pagnam, MS, and Simon Paul Navarro, MA, presented their research findings at a virtual event November 18, 2025, honoring their graduation as Academic-Practice Research Fellows.
The competitive two-year fellowship supports NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) nurses in conducting clinically meaningful research. It is part of Columbia Nursing’s Linking to Improve Nursing Knowledge (LINK), an award-winning program founded in 2014 to integrate nursing research and scholarship across academia and practice.
“The first year of the program is spent conceptualizing the study, gaining ethical approval for the study, conducting it, gathering the data, cleaning the data, analyzing the data. Then in the second year, the fellows focus on writing up their manuscript and submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal,” Associate Professor Kasey Jackman, PhD ’17, LINK’s program director, explained.
Pagnam, a nurse educator in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (ICU) at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, implemented a Cardiac Arrest Prevention Safety Huddle Sheet, with the goal of reducing cardiac arrests in this setting. One in 100 pediatric ICU patients experience cardiac arrest, with a mortality rate of up to 60%.
She found that simulated interventions run with the huddle sheet resulted in more clinically indicated interventions being completed and longer time to patient decompensation compared to simulations where the sheet was not used. “Overall, the staff felt more comfortable and prepared in the simulations that were run with the safety huddle sheet,” Pagnam said. “The nurses were able to better anticipate what the providers would be asking of them.”
Navarro, a clinical nurse at NYP Columbia and a PhD student at Columbia Nursing, studied relationships among exposure to bullying, discrimination, violence in the workplace, burnout, and turnover among nurses. Exposure to negative workplace factors is common, he found, and these factors were associated with a greater likelihood of intending to leave one’s job.
He noted that half of the nurses he surveyed said they intended to leave, and half reported experiencing burnout more than once a week. Authentic leadership was associated with a lower likelihood of reporting violence, bullying, or discrimination in the workplace, but was not related to intention to leave. “Our project laid the groundwork for future studies about implementing targeted strategies that aim to reduce bullying, discrimination, workplace violence and burnout,” Navarro concluded.
The fellows’ work is “absolutely impressive,” said Assistant Professor Allison Norful, PhD ’17, a LINK faculty member and one of Navarro’s mentors. “Let's just acknowledge that these are nurses working in a clinical setting full-time. To undertake these very complex studies is such a feat.”
Dean Lorraine Frazier, PhD, called the LINK fellowship program “a win-win” in her closing remarks. “It’s a win for us at Columbia, it’s a win for the hospital. It’s a win for the patients and their families, who are the most important people.”