NLN Honors Brother Ignatius Perkins with Lifetime Achievement for Transformative Excellence Award

NLN Honors Brother Ignatius Perkins with Lifetime Achievement for Transformative Excellence Award

Special Honor Recognizes a Legacy of Service Over Career Spanning 60 Years

Washington, DC — In recognition of his remarkable legacy in the field of nursing and health care, the National League for Nursing will honor Brother Ignatius Perkins, OP, PhD, RN, FAAN with the newly created, once-in-a-generation NLN President’s Lifetime Achievement for Transformative Excellence Award. Brother Perkins will receive this award honoring his venerable 60-year career during the 2024 NLN Education Summit in San Antonio, Texas, September 18-20.

With more than 1,200 leaders in nursing education expected for this annual event, Brother Perkins will be celebrated by nursing education and health care colleagues, mentees, students, and professional organizations whose success he has supported and influenced. Through their work, he has left an indelible legacy for the nation’s health care, public health, and ethical practice of nursing and medicine.

“Blending both an impressive background as a nursing leader, educator, and bioethics scholar in an amazingly collaborative manner, you have built bridges with other disciplines, agencies, and communities while consistently daring to accomplish the next goal. With a deep and intrinsic understanding of human nature integrated with caring and compassion, you have provided students with a secure place of learning and knowledge where they can unreservedly find their place in the world. You epitomize the highest standards in nursing education, mentoring and professional development,” said NLN Chair Patricia Sharpnack, DNP, RN, CNE, NEA-BC, ANEF, FAAN, Dean and Strawbridge Professor at the Breen School of Nursing and Health Professions at Ursuline College in Ohio, in a letter to Brother Perkins notifying him of this honor.

“You embody the National League for Nursing core values of Caring, promoting health, healing, and hope in response to the human condition; Integrity respecting the dignity and moral wholeness of every person without conditions or limitation; Diversity and Inclusion affirming the uniqueness of and differences among persons, ideas, values, and ethnicities; and of course, Excellence, co-creating and implementing transformative strategies with daring ingenuity,” added NLN President and CEO Beverly Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN.

Brother Ignatius Perkins, OP, PhD, RN, a Dominican Friar, serves as coordinator of the Safeguarding Program, Dominican Friars, Eastern Province and Professor of Nursing in the Department of Nursing at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in nursing and education from the Catholic University of America and Spalding University, to which he returned in 2019 for his second stint as chair of Spalding’s School of Nursing. There, he oversaw all undergraduate and graduate nursing programs.

In his earlier turn as the college’s leader, from 2003-05, he simultaneously served as dean of the university’s College of Health and Natural Sciences, which followed his term on the university faculty. From 2010-15, he was the dean of the School of Nursing at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee.

Brother Perkins holds fellowships in the American Academy of Nursing; the NLN Academy of Nursing Education; the New York Academy of Medicine; the Royal Society of Medicine; and the National Catholic Bioethics Center. Under the mentorship of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship in primary care and clinical bioethics at Georgetown University, where he currently serves as an Affiliated Scholar in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics in Washington, D.C.

With 60 years of experience in nursing practice and education and health care ethics, Brother Perkins is widely published and known for his advocacy in assisting clinicians and supporting vulnerable members of society – the poor, homeless, elderly, victims and survivors of abuse, and the terminally ill – protecting and defending their dignity, freedom and human flourishing using Pellegrino’s Healing Relationship Model in research, clinical practice, presentations and publications.

An active member of multiple professional organizations, including the National Association of Catholic Nurses, the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, and the Catholic Medical Association, Brother Perkins is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. Among these is the National League for Nursing President’s Award, presented to him for career achievement in nursing and public service in 2021. As a member of the National League for Nursing for nearly 50 years, Brother Perkins has served on the Board of Governors, as an accreditation site visitor, and on the NLN Commission for Nursing Education Accreditation (CNEA), and in many other key roles, both official and unofficial.

For more information about the NLN Education Summit, visit Summit.NLN.org.

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