Description of the video:

My name is Rachel Wion, and I'm an assistant professor in the Indiana University School of Nursing. When I was working as a nurse in acute care hospital, I would have patients with chronic conditions that we would send home, and we would give them education to manage your condition. And then later on when I worked as a home health nurse, I found that they really didn't have the tools to help manage your condition necessarily. And, I also found that, you know, they didn't necessarily have the support, or their caregivers weren't able to help the management conditions. So later on, when I went to graduate school, I was approached by an administrator in graduate school to see if I wanted to be a graduate assistant to work with one of the professors on her research. And that really sparked my interest in research because her research was helping to solve these problems that I saw. She worked on self-management of chronic conditions for people and their caregivers, so that really sparked my interest in research. My area of research focuses on cognitive aging in people with HIV. I'm specifically interested in middle-age and older people with HIV who have subjective cognitive decline, and how we can construct interventions to help mitigate this decline, actually prevent the decline, and help to improve their quality of life. I think what nurses bring to research that maybe some other professions do not would be just that we look at the holistic aspects of the person. We don't just focus on one little area of like a chronic condition. So I want to look at, you know, do they have social support, or do they have adequate resources that they're able to take care of their condition? As an early-career professional, I chose the Indiana University School of Nursing because of the collaborative environment. The support I've received has been immense. Also, we have something called the research incubator, where we can just bounce ideas off of each other, and it's been invaluable to me to have that opportunity, even if it's someone who's not in the same area of research. Just their expertise has been valuable. The Indiana University School of Nursing has exceeded my expectations in fostering my research. [Music]