Desirée Hensel, associate professor and graduate of Indiana University BSN class of 1983, has been selected as the founding dean of the Curry College School of Nursing. She joined the Bloomington campus faculty in 2005 and earned a PhD in health and human behavior from Walden University in 2009. In 2016, she assumed the role of interim Bloomington campus administrator. Dr. Hensel is the co-editor of the bestselling Lippincott’s NCLEX RN Q&A and has published extensively on nursing education in top-tier nursing journals.
In 2015, Desirée and her husband moved their permanent residence to Vermont. She has been commuting between New England and Indiana ever since. When the founding dean opportunity arose at Curry College, it just felt right. The school is private, four-year liberal arts institution located in Milton, Massachusetts, with a robust nursing program of almost 900 students. It prides itself on being the first CCNE-accredited school in the state of Massachusetts.
Dr. Hensel will assume her new role later this summer. While Curry College has been educating nurses for almost 40 years, Dr. Hensel will be the first dean of the program as Curry reorganizes its administrative structure. She believes that the skills she gained from working with the outstanding faculty and students at Indiana University School of Nursing was what earned her this leadership role. Helping Curry develop their simulation program will be one of her early projects. Long term, her goal is to teach the next generation of nurses and nursing faculty how to think differently, including using Q methodology for research, program evaluation, and quality improvement. She will miss her alma mater but looks forward to this new challenge.