The Fuld Leadership Program
Fuld Fellowships
Karen Thomisee
Biographical Sketch
Reflections on the Fuld Fellowship
Biographical Sketch
Karen Thomisee grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and has lived and worked in several Southern and Central Appalachian communities. After attended Warren Wilson College for two years, she moved to Hyden, Kentucky to work for the Frontier Nursing Service. While there, she volunteered with nurse-midwives and family nurse-practitioners and later served as the staff coordinator of the Courier Program, a rural health care volunteer externship program.
Karen returned to NC to finish her degree in photography and then worked as a newspaper photographer. Her work with outreach ministries through the Episcopal Church led to her joining a pediatric medical team to Haiti in 2003. Karen soon returned to teach photography to children, after which she implemented a participatory research project with Haitian midwives aimed at lowering rates of prenatal and childhood malnutrition. She also earned a Bachelor’s of Liberal Arts from Goddard College.
During her time at Emory, she has traveled to Moultrie, GA with the Family Farm Worker Health Program, to Jamaica to work with the Missionaries of the Poor and to Eleuthra, Bahamas to work with nurses as part of the Alternative Spring Break program. She also continues to travel to Haiti; she is currently conducting research about soil ingestion by women there. Karen is also involved with Health Students Taking Action Together as the policy coordinator of their Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative and as an editor for the on-line peer reviewed journal, Context.
Karen is an intern at the Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing and a graduate nurse fellow for a community-academic partnership between Emory University and Carver High School in Atlanta. Karen, who is passionate about maternal and child health, is a graduate student in the Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Program-Primary Care.
Reflection on the Fellowship
The Fuld Fellowship has allowed me to build on my previous life and career, weaving what may seem to others like disconnected experiences into a varied tapestry that informs and expands my nursing education. Furthermore, the opportunity to pursue my nursing education within the context of social responsibility has confirmed in me that nursing provides the toolkit with which I want to engage with the world. Nursing allows me the wonderful privilege of being attentive to the particular person in front of me, while the experiences I’ve had as a Fuld Fellowship have helped me engage in the larger social issues which impact individual’ health. Leadership can have many dimensions, and it’s exciting to think about how I’ve grown and developed as a leader since I firs t began my nursing education. I still believe in leading by example and am naturally more comfortable with this form of “quiet leadership.” However, the opportunities as well as mentorship (of faculty and fellow students) afforded by the Fuld Fellowship have encouraged me to stretch in how I provide leadership in social responsibility and nursing. I am now pursuing my master’s specialty area of Pediatric Nurse Practitioner (Primary Care) and am on the last leg of my nursing school journey. I plan to return to work in an underserved region either in the rural Appalachia or abroad. I feel excited and prepared to encounter my professional world with the tools I have gained from my participation in the Fuld program. I can honestly say I would no t be the same nurse I am now becoming if I had not had this exceptional opportunity.
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