Marianne Baernholdt, PhD
Marianne Baernholdt is the Dean of the UVA School of Nursing. She has dedicated her career to teaching and mentoring students and junior faculty and is a leading scholar of care quality and safety whose work has emphasized factors affecting health in rural and global environments.
Before becoming dean, she was director of the University of North Carolina’s Pan American Health Organization/WHO Collaborating Center in Quality and Safety Education in Nursing and Midwifery, and a former U.S. representative for the International Council of Nurses’ steering group for rural and remote nursing.
Her hiring marks her return to UVA, where she had previously been a faculty member at the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences. During her time at UVA, her leadership roles included serving as director of global initiatives for the School of Nursing and director of its Rural & Global Health Care Center. In addition, Dean Baernholdt has also served at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University. There she was founding director of the Langston Center for Quality, Safety & Innovation and interim department chair for Adult Health & Health Systems.
Her research focuses on how quality of care should be defined and the various factors that affect care quality in rural areas around the globe. She has expertise in using large databases to track organizational, patient, and clinician outcomes.
Dean Baernholdt is the author, with Diane K. Boyle, of Nurses' Contributions to Quality Health Outcomes (Springer: 2021) and numerous articles and book chapters on topics ranging from rural health to quality improvement and workplace bullying. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, among a long list of accolades that includes awards for outstanding faculty, outstanding faculty research publication, and innovative teaching.
Dean Baernholdt earned a PhD in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in public health from Columbia University. She earned an MSN in critical care from Columbia and an MPH in international health, a BSN from Pace University, and a diploma in nursing from Bispebjerg Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark.