Undergraduate Research Assistantships

Cara Gallegos has been with the School of Nursing since 2013 and currently directs the URA program. She has previous experience in patient safety management and patient education in pediatric settings. She received her PhD from the University of New Mexico where her dissertation focused on stress and coping in parents of critically ill children in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). Her areas of research are parental stress and coping of critically ill infants and children, evidence-based practice, and quality improvement. She also holds an MSN in Advanced Practice in Pediatrics specializing in Pediatric Cardiology, and a BSN from the University of Alberta in Canada. 

Hannah Nakashima graduated from Boise State with her undergraduate nursing degree in 2018. She was a URA for two and a half years, and published two research articles as a secondary author with Cara Gallegos addressing educational technology in nursing curriculum. Hannah says she enjoys the different kinds of problem-solving that are involved in research, and she learned how to read and learn from academic literature more effectively. In 2020, she published her first research paper as a primary author in collaboration with Cara Gallegos in Critical Care Nurse. Hannah currently works with Healthwise in Boise to develop patient care and education content.

Daum Jung graduated in spring 2021. She will have worked as a URA for three semesters alongside faculty members including Karen Godard, where she focused on prevalence of child maltreatment and researched the efficacy of educational material used to instruct nurses how to spot child victims. She also worked with Lucy Zhao to investigate how nurses can help combat post-operative delirium in surgical patients. Daum says she learned the details of hospital-led clinical trials, procedure and drug development, and data interpretation. Her own professional research interests include early screening and prevention for cancer, including behavioral and lifestyle elements.

Sarah McKiddy graduated in spring 2021. Sarah is currently working with Renee Walters to study compassion and self-care among undergraduate nursing students. Her interest in nursing research comes from a place of patient advocacy: “Nursing research will help me reduce stigmas around certain patient populations, and increase awareness around population disparities.” She is particularly interested in age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, and developing methods to support patients and their caregivers. She plans to apply to doctoral programs at the University of Washington and the University of Oklahoma to research the health of gerontological patients.