MarySue V. Heilemann, PhD, RN

With a desire to advocate for health and social justice, MarySue V. Heilemann became a registered nurse. This opened the door for her to work with women of low income as a labor and delivery nurse, a home visiting public health nurse, and a community-based program coordinator. The realities she encountered led her to back to the university to gain skills and expand her perspective on inequities of gender, race/ethnicity, and power. Graduate and postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing plus key courses in Ethnic Studies with Chicano professors at Berkeley, Stanford and San Francisco State University greatly influenced the direction she took. Dr. Heilemann joined the faculty at UCLA where she is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing, an Associate Program Director of the National Clinician Scholars Program in the School of Medicine, and Affiliate Faculty at the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, and Health in the Fielding School of Public Health. Her work to improve the accuracy of media representations of nurses and her research using evidence-based transmedia storytelling to enhance Latinas’ health led her to the United Nations. She was selected to serve as a delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women 2018-2019. Dr. Heilemann mentors scholars and young faculty in qualitative research methodology and collaborates in various studies in the US and internationally. She continues to advocate for more accurate media portrayals of nurses and to expand her research that involves the creation of a nurse character for a transmedia storytelling web-app targeting Latina mental health.