Faculty profile: Elizabeth Campbell

From the halls of Penn State, and the fields of the Midwest to the snowdrifts of Alaska—and even the tundra of Russia, Elizabeth Campbell has traveled the world. Now, she calls SUNYIT home.

Campbell, associate professor of nursing, began teaching public health nursing this semester. She says that specializing in a health field that deals with the community rather than the individual can open doors to many career opportunities once students enter the working world.

“There are so many different areas of public health nursing,” Campbell says. “School nursing is considered public health, there’s occupational health, people can work in a health department. There are just so many avenues they can specialize in.”

Drawing on her own experiences, Campbell notes that when she was in Anchorage, Alaska, the municipal health department had various sections of specialty, including a sexually transmitted disease section and an immunization section, to name a few.

“So there are just so many things you can do,” she says. “With public health nursing, you’re looking at the whole public, the members of the community. We don’t look at the individual needs so much as what are the community needs. And maybe it’s the needs of all the individuals, but it’s looking at the broader picture.”

Campbell, who earned a Ph.D. in community health education from the University of Tennessee; and a “master’s degree in burn, emergency and trauma nursing [and a] bachelor’s degree in nursing” from the University of Pennsylvania, says that nursing has been a wonderful profession for her. It has allowed her to do many different things throughout her career and meet many different people. The experiences that she’s garnered from her work were invaluable and now she hopes that a new generation of students can become as passionate about the work as she has been.

“I hope the people that come out of this program, students that I’ve had or anyone, come out with a real love of the profession and that they have a real drive to contribute to the profession, the community and the world,” she says. “I’d like the students to have a more global perspective because we are affected by everything that goes on in the world.”