Cynthia O'Sullivan

Cynthia Kline O'Sullivan, RN, MSN, PhD is Associate Professor of Nursing at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). She also provides home-based primary care to homebound and elderly patients who suffer from chronic and debilitating conditions that prevent them from seeking care in an office setting. Dr. O'Sullivan earned her BSN from Pennsylvania State University in 1981, her MSN with a concentration in Acute and Critical Care of Adults from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, her PhD in Nursing from Yale University in 2011, and her Family Nurse Practitioner post-master's certificate from Maryville University in St. Louis in 2016. Dr. O'Sullivan has held positions of staff nurse, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Nurse Manager, nursing faculty, and family nurse practitioner. She served in administrative positions within large university medical centers for over 11 years as well as on Boards of Directors for several professional organizations. She currently serves as the President of the Connecticut Coalition to Improve End of Life Care (CTEOL), a non-profit state organization whose purpose is to develop comprehensive approaches to improving care and support to dying patients and their families through education, research, and policy initiatives. She is also an active member of the Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (MOLST) Steering Committee and Education Committee for the state of Connecticut. She has served on four annual conference planning committees and the Research Committee for the CT Advanced Practice Nursing Society (CTAPRNS) as well as on the conference planning committee for the American Psycho-oncology Society (APOS). Past roles have included serving on the CLN Informatics Task Force, a state-wide group of nursing faculty, charged with developing and integrating effective options for incorporating informatics into the nursing curricula at all levels of nursing education. Dr. O'Sullivan was appointed as Coordinator (now Program Director) for the Masters of Science in Nursing Programs at SCSU in Fall, 2012. She serves as a lead faculty member in the MSN program, as well as faculty for the baccalaureate and EdD programs in nursing. She has served on the SCSU Graduate Council for many years, and was elected Graduate Council Chair since Fall 2019, having been elected Vice-Chair from 2015-2019. She was the Chair of Academic Standards Committee that time and spearheaded the university's program review process for its launch of the department-wide review process, naming it the StAR Committee (Standards Assessment and Review) in 2018. Dr. O'Sullivan was the co-recipient of a $25,000 research grant from the American Cancer Society in 2017 for a project (shared with a faculty member from Fairfield University) designed to educate the community about end-of-life-care. This research is ongoing and has resulted in two presentations and a publication, with more forthcoming. She received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the United States Department of Defense in 2004 for her doctoral work, which explores psychological distress among women undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. She was awarded a Nightingale Award for her work in Nursing Education in 2002. In 1994, she was awarded the Nurse Management Excellence Award in from the Massachusetts Organization of Nurse Executives/Massachusetts Organization of Nurse Managers.