There are some new faces around the Williams-Brice Nursing Building this semester; three new faculty members have joined our celebrated staff. With extensive clinical and educational backgrounds, they bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to nursing classrooms.
Lindy Beaver, DNP, MSN, RN, CHE
Lindy Beaver comes to Carolina after a more than 30-year career in acute care hospital settings. Prior to joining our faculty, she worked in various roles at Laurens County Memorial Hospital, Palmetto Health Richland and Newberry County Memorial Hospital. She was part of the small team that opened InterMedical Hospital at Palmetto Health Baptist, now known as ContinueCARE. In addition to her role as a faculty member, Beaver is also assisting with clinical placements for undergraduate students.
Beaver is no stranger to the USC College of Nursing; she’s a three-time degree holder from the college, having earned her BSN and MSN here, and just recently finishing her DNP in December 2016. In addition to her nursing knowledge and experience, she brings leadership skills and expertise to the college. Beaver served as president of the South Carolina Organization of Nurse Leaders (SCONL) until January 2018 and will serve as past president for the next two years. She has also served on the South Carolina Hospital Association board and on a hospital advisory council for the Joint Commission.
“Teaching is going to be different for me, though I’ve always thought of myself as a teacher,” Beaver said. “As a clinical nurse specialist, I did a lot of teaching, though it was mostly to practicing nurses. Teaching student nurses will be a new world for me, but I’m excited about it.”
Katherine Jones, DNP, RN, CENP, CCM
Katherine Jones, or Kate as she prefers to be called, worked most of her career in home health care before transitioning into a job in public policy. After finishing her DNP in May 2017, she decided to explore teaching and worked as an adjunct instructor at Belmont University in Nashville. She came to the University of South Carolina after searching for a faculty position within a university that had a strong masters in nursing administration program.
“Nursing administration is what my masters degree and my expertise is in. Believe it or not, some schools are canceling their nursing administration programs or putting them on hold, so it was important to me to find a university with a good, strong program that was growing, and this job at USC was exactly what I was looking for.”
Jones is working on a scholarship project that expands her doctoral project and focuses on caring as a leadership competency. She’s aiming to combine ideas around caring science with the behaviors that are required in executive nurse leadership roles. She is also interested in home health nursing and community-based care in general, and looking to garner more interest in those practice settings.
Cheryl Mele, DNP, PNP AC/PC-BC, NNP-BC
Cheryl Mele is a pediatric nurse practitioner certified in acute, primary and neonatal care. She is from the northeastern United States, and most recently worked at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as a nurse practitioner in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine.
Mele also worked at Drexel University and Seaton Hall University as the director of acute and pediatric nurse practitioner programs for both schools. At Drexel University, Mele developed a curriculum for the dual pediatric nurse practitioner program, of which there are only three or four in the country. She came to the University of South Carolina both for the pediatric nurse practitioner opportunities as well as the palliative care initiative within the college.
Mele is interested in expanding the scope of her DNP project, which focused on delivering bad news to patients and families and training advanced practice nurse practitioners on how to do so. She’s interested in an interdisciplinary focus not only with nurse practitioners but medical professionals as well as undergraduate nurses.