UB's Ronald Named Fellow In American Academy of Nursing

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Judith S. Ronald, Ed.D., R.N., associate professor of nursing and coordinator of nursing informatics in the University at Buffalo School of Nursing, has been named a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.

Recognizing outstanding contributions to the field of nursing, fellow status in the academy is one of the highest honors that can be conferred upon a nurse.

Ronald is a pioneer in the emerging field of nursing informatics, which applies computer and information science to information management in nursing. For more than 15 years, she has worked to introduce basic computer and information science into nursing education, in both undergraduate and graduate academic settings as well as in practice settings.

Her work led to a monograph, "Guidelines for Basic Computer Education in Nursing," that has become the primary resource on the topic for schools of nursing in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.

Ronald's research has focused on computer competencies and the learning needs of nursing faulty, for which she developed an innovative assessment instrument that has been adapted for use by other researchers.

Her research findings led her to create the Nurse Scholars Program, designed to provide nursing faculty with an opportunity to learn about and use automated health-care information systems.

In 1992, she received a federal grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to identify essential informatics knowledge and skills needed by nursing administrators and to revise the graduate nursing administration curriculum accordingly.

She has been instrumental in forming informatics organizations on a national and international level, and participated on a task force of the International Medical Informatics Association that developed international standards for informatics competencies for nurse administrators, practitioners, educators and researchers.

Ronald has presented papers and conducted workshops on nursing informatics throughout the United States and in Denmark, Sweden, Holland, England and Australia.

She resides in Buffalo.