Eileen Sullivan-Marx is Dean of NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and the Erline Perkins McGriff Professor of Nursing and will assume the presidency of the American Academy of Nursing this year. She also is a professor emerita and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing where she is an alumna. Dr. Sullivan-Marx was an American Association of Political Science Congressional Fellow from 2010-12, serving as a senior advisor to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and is currently a health and aging policy fellow. She is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing, the New York Academy of Medicine and the Gerontological Society of America. She serves on the boards of the United Hospital Fund and the Arnold P. Gold Foundations here in New York City.

Dr. Sullivan-Marx is renowned as a nursing leader, educator, and clinician for her work in aging care healthcare reform in communities. She has led payment reform to recognize nurses’ work.

In 2008, Dr. Sullivan-Marx served as chair of the Pennsylvania Commission on Senior Care Services and was a member of the Philadelphia Emergency Preparation Review Committee in 2006. During Superstorm Sandy, Dr. Sullivan- Marx, as a new dean of two months, led the NYU School of Nursing, a disaster response in Washington Square to provide services and healthcare to homebound persons living in high rises with students and faculty during the blackout week. Her work was recognized by the NYU trustees and then President John Sexton for contributing to solace and prevention of worsened health for many who were sheltered in place without water, heat, or light.

She received the international Sigma Theta Tau Honor Society Best of Image Research Award (1993), the Hippensteel Founders Award for Excellence in Practice Award (2011), and the Doris Schwartz Gerontological Nursing Research Award (2013), and VillageCare Award Distinguished Service Award in 2016. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni from the University of Rochester School of Nursing and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

Dr. Sullivan-Marx’s Irish roots in America are traced to her sixth paternal great grandfather, Joseph Collett Pennock, born in 1677 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, and who emigrated to Pennsylvania as a seven-year-old with his family, who were members of the Society of Friends but returned to Ireland for an education in Clonmel. In 1701, he returned to the Pennsylvania colony after inheriting property there. As a merchant and landowner, he was a public servant and served in the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1716 to 1745, building a home in what is now Chester County, P.A. named Primitive Hall, that still stands today. Joseph Pennock was a supporter of the Declaration of Independence. He died in 1771 at the age of 93. Eileen’s paternal Sullivan roots are traced to Patrick Sullivan, who emigrated to Smyrna Delaware in the 1850s at the age of 14 as an apprentice carriage painter, her paternal great-grandmother, Julia Wall, who came as a child to Pennsylvania in the 1840s, and maternal great-grandparents, James Logue and Annie Kelly, who emigrated from Ireland as children to the Philadelphia area in the 1840s. ♦