‘While we treat diseases, we do not treat the root cause’
Who has been most influential on your career as a nurse and as a researcher?
While I had lots of great clinical ideas for research, my post-doctoral mentor, David Ronis, was an excellent methodologist and statistician, and he was definitely the most influential person on my grant writing.
Of your published research, which do you think has been the most influential and why?
Two areas of work have been the most influential. The first is my research that has shown that health behaviours, particularly smoking, can negatively influence biomarkers and survival among cancer patients. The second is showing the effectiveness of nurse-administered smoking interventions in real-world settings.
In a large cohort of head and neck cancer patients, I was the first to show that pre-treatment IL-6 predicted survival among head and neck cancer patients controlling for demographic, clinical, treatment, and health
...