Eileen Sullivan-Marx is dean emerita of New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing. She served as dean and Erline Perkins McGriff Professor from 2012-2023. She is past president of the American Academy of Nursing. Prior to NYU, Dr. Sullivan-Marx had a distinguished career at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, where she was the associate dean for practice & community affairs, creating community partnerships for care of older adults and promotion of healthy activities entitled Healthy in Philadelphia. She is a distinguished nursing leader, educator, and clinician known for research and innovative approaches in primary care, testing methods of payment for nurses particularly with Medicaid and Medicare, sustaining models of care using advanced practice nurses locally and globally, and developing health policy in community-based settings. With a strong belief in the integration of practice, research, education, and interdisciplinary teamwork, Dr. Sullivan-Marx has built and sustained models of team care including a private family practice, growing a Program of All Inclusive Care for Elders (PACE) from 75 persons to 525 persons in five years that saved the state of Pennsylvania fifteen cents on the dollar in Medicaid funding and launched numerous older adult team programs in academic centers as well as the Veterans Administration. Dr. Sullivan-Marx has been on numerous community planning and advisory boards including the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Patient and Safety Board from 2009-2012.
She was the first nurse to serve as the American Nurses Association representative to the American Medical Association’s Resource Based Relative Value Update Committee and did so for 11 years, demonstrating through research that nurse practitioner and physician work can be valued equally in that payment structure. Dr. Sullivan-Marx has been active in regional, state, and national policy. She has served as Chair of the Pennsylvania Commission on Senior Care Services in 2008, as a member of the Philadelphia Emergency Preparation Review Commission in 2006, and as an American Political Science Congressional Fellow and Senior Advisor to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of Medicaid and Medicare Coordination in 2010, just after passage of the Affordable Care Act. As part of this position, she worked to bring promising models of care to scale such as the PACE Programs. She is a former member of the American Academy of Nursing’s (AAN) Board of Directors and is currently an AAN Edge Runner. Dr. Sullivan-Marx is a Fellow in both the New York Academy of Medicine and the Gerontology Society of America.
Among the numerous awards that she has received are the international Sigma Theta Tau Honor Society Best of Image research award (1993) and its excellence in practice award (2011), the Springer Publishing Research Award, the Doris Schwartz Gerontological Nursing Research Award. She is a Distinguished Alumni of the University of Rochester School of Nursing.
Dean Sullivan-Marx began her nursing career in 1972 in Philadelphia, earned a BSN (1976) from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MS (1980) from the University of Rochester School of Nursing as a family health nurse practitioner. She received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in 1995. Her nurse practitioner career was exemplified by forging and sustaining primary care practices which she successfully and uniquely integrated into her academic research and teaching career.
