 
School of Nursing prof wins
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Irene Kalnins, Ed.D, associate professor of nursing at the School of Nursing, has received a grant under the new Fulbright Alumni Initiatives Award Program.
Kalnins' application for her project, "Shared Learning in Community Health Nursing," was one of only 22 to be funded from more than 525 submitted. She is the only winner from a Missouri institution.
The Fulbright Alumni Initiatives Awards Program, launched in April of this year, offers grants to former Fulbright senior scholars to support projects that continue work and partnerships initiated while they were abroad.
As a Fulbright lecturer during the spring semester of 1999, Kalnins taught public health courses at Stradinu University (formerly the Academy of Medicine) in Latvia, a Baltic country formerly part of the Soviet Union.
With this new funding, Kalnins plans to link the School of Nursing students with nursing students at Stradinu University, using the Internet to share their experiences in community health nursing.
"I hope the students here and in Latvia will gain an appreciation for the universal aspects of community health nursing," said Kalnins. "By sharing their stories of working with minority and low-income populations, I think the students will realize how many similarities there are in their chosen professions, even though they live in very different countries."
Kalnins thinks the nursing students in Latvia may be surprised to learn of the challenges faced by health care professionals in the United States. "Often in Latvia, people think of the United States as the land of plenty, and that our health care system is trouble-free. But nurses here face many of the same challenges as those in Latvia."
Born in Latvia, Kalnins came to the United States as a young girl. She is still fluent in Latvian and will be able to help translate when needed. "It will be a great way for future nurses to discuss their clinical experiences and reflect on them from a transcultural perspective," she said.
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