In July, Mary Whipple ’09 was awarded a $100,000 scholarship by the National Hartford Center of Gerontological Nursing Excellence. It was the only such award that the center bestowed this year. As the 2015–17 Patricia G. Archbold Scholar, Whipple, a nursing Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, is recognized as a promising leader committed to gerontological nursing with a strong research plan and a dedicated mentoring team at the nursing school.
Whipple’s plan is to study barriers to exercise in older adults who have diabetes and peripheral artery disease. “I want to see if these barriers are related to falls and fear of falling, with the hope that the next step would be figuring out what we can do about it,” she says. Part of Whipple’s interest in gerontological nursing came from personal experience as a caretaker for her grandmother, who had diabetes and had suffered a fall and adverse complications.
Whipple began exploring her interest in chronic conditions in older adults as a clinical research coordinator for five years in Mayo Clinic’s Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Clinic, her first job after graduating from Luther. At the clinic, she says, “I was involved in writing research protocols, getting the approval for studies, identifying and recruiting participants, going through the consent process with participants, collecting data, data entry, data analysis, and helping write abstracts and papers.”
Some of the research at the clinic was conducted in collaboration with her former mentor at Luther, Loren Toussaint, associate professor of psychology. “While I was at Luther,” Whipple says, “I worked with Loren, and seeing his passion for research helped further my interest in continuing to do research.” Toussaint and Whipple were both involved with studies at the clinic and subsequent papers about forgiveness in women with fibromyalgia and variability of symptoms of fibromyalgia over time.
Whipple went back to school to earn a bachelor of science in nursing degree while working at Mayo. “I really enjoyed being a research coordinator, but I also wanted to have some patient care opportunities, and nursing seemed like a really nice fit,” she says. At the University of Minnesota School of Nursing on the Rochester campus, she was in the honors program and wrote a thesis looking at the effect of a walking exercise program on the quality of life in older adults. That led to her decision to work toward her Ph.D. She plans to conduct research and teach at a university after completing the degree.