| Washington, DC — During the past decade, the National League for Nursing has provided more than $1 million to faculty scholars to support research in nursing education with grants and scholarships awarded through the League’s Foundation for Nursing Education. The Foundation’s robust research grants program has just received a significant boost with the first new endowment fund created in at least five years: the Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo Health Informatics and Innovation Collaborative Endowment Fund.
The benefactor, Edmund J. Y. Pajarillo, PhD, RN BC, CPHQ, NEA BC, ANEF, an Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Graduate Studies in Nursing of the College of Nursing and Public Health at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, is an informatics scholar whose own research has centered on the intersection of informatics, leadership and mentoring in nursing education, practice, research and administration.
With its focus on informatics and innovation in the use of data analysis and health information technology, the Pajarillo fund opens a new avenue of scholarship to support the League and its members. Grant applicants will be nurses pursuing advanced degrees (master’s and doctorates) who will serve as principal investigators to transition to full-time teaching or nurse educators with an interest in theoretical and applied informatics in nursing education. They may have collaborators in their teams but the grantee is the primary investigator. Applications to the Pajarillo fund for grants in the 2022 funding cycle will be considered in three broad categories:
• Projects that conceptualize and translate nursing informatics concepts and theories into new applications and systems to facilitate nursing education, practice, and science.
• Projects that establish, expand, and influence future nurses’ roles to further optimize and expand their marketability and professional demand.
• Projects that create nursing educational technology to foster and enhance high impact practice (HIP) learning.
“This incredible gift will enable the NLN Foundation to continue to advance the profession of nursing through research that informs and promotes evidence-based teaching, enhances the science of nursing education, and provides and interprets data about nursing education and the faculty workforce,” said NLN Foundation Board of Trustees Chair, Cole Edmonson, DNP, RN, FACHE, NEA-BC, FAAN, FAONL. “The Pajarillo fund exponentially expands our opportunity for positive impact in these critical areas. We are truly grateful to Dr. Pajarillo for his vision, leadership and commitment to advancing the science of informatics.”
In partnering with the NLN Foundation to set up the fund in his name, Dr. Pajarillo said, “Informatics has a strong impact on nursing, whether in practice, education, research or administration. We have seen how nursing and nurses’ roles have evolved with the introduction of new technologies. It is up to us, practitioners in nursing, to change the courses in our own roles, by rethinking how these technologies and informatic concepts can help us transform our roles, rather than technologies forcing us into roles and responsibilities that we do not like, or those that go against the values and tenets of nursing as our profession. It is the aim of this scholarship that I encourage nurses to lead collaborative teams to think of innovations that are informatics-mediated and to re-envision what our future as nurses can be like.”
Application timelines will be announced in Fall 2021 at NLN.org/Foundation. Applicants must be enrolled in accredited graduate level programs, having completed at least one year of study towards their degree. The NLN Foundation will give special consideration to nurses of color and members of other underserved populations interested in transitioning from practice to full-time teaching.
For more information about the Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo Health Informatics & Innovation Collaborative Endowment Fund, click here.
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