Welcome Message from the Dean - Fall 2025
To the Columbia Nursing community,
I’m delighted to welcome everyone back to campus after what I hope was an enjoyable long weekend for all of you (and a restful summer break for some of you). It’s wonderful to see the entire campus buzzing with students as we begin the fall semester. I always consider this to be an important time of reflection, appreciation, and anticipation as we approach a new season and a new academic year.
For some of us, though, the summer doesn’t offer a respite as much as it does a change of pace. In fact, it’s typically a very busy time on campus. Over the summer while students are busy with classes—members of our faculty, administration, and staff are here at work: discussing improvements to the curriculum, implementing procedural innovations, prepping all the details that make an enterprise as complex as Columbia Nursing hum smoothly once the fall academic year begins. I have to say, although I value opportunities for rest and reflection, I am equally grateful for the focused activity, purposeful work, and collegial engagement that takes place here over the summer. It’s an essential part of ensuring our continual growth and productive engagement with each other.
As a result, we once again begin a new academic year with a lot to look forward to and be grateful for. We are entering a time of great progress for the school, as we launch new programs and new ways of teaching and learning, including a Hybrid MDE program and transformative AI capabilities; more details about these and other exciting new ventures will be forthcoming soon. Our faculty and administrators are great nursing clinicians, leaders, and researchers; I continue to be awed by how you keep the school in the vanguard of the nursing profession. And our students—steeped as you are in this inspiring milieu—will, I have every confidence, be worthy successors to your teachers.
Indeed, we are part of the greatness of Columbia University and Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Our clinical practice, our research, and our innovative curriculum are our legacy to the communities and patients we serve.
To our students—new and returning—we welcome you and can’t wait to see you advance in your career, no matter where it takes you.
To our entire nursing community, thank you for your partnership, collaboration, and resilience. As we head into the new academic year, I am so proud to have you at my side. I know the mettle that nurses embody at every turn will continue to serve us all well!
Lorraine Frazier, PhD, RN, FAAN
Dean and Mary O’Neil Mundinger Professor
Senior Vice President, Columbia University Irving Medical Center