Claire Pettengill

Claire Pettengill is honored to be the recipient of the Madeline A. Naegle Scholarship for Mental Health Nursing from Nurses Educational Funds, Inc. (NEF). She is currently a Doctor of Nursing Practice - Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (DNP-PMHNP) candidate at Columbia University School of Nursing, specializing in women's mental health across the lifespan and the role of artificial intelligence and algorithmic justice in psychiatric nursing practice.

Claire earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed post-baccalaureate training in Music Therapy and Child Life at California State University, Northridge, becoming a board-certified music therapist and certified child life specialist. For nearly eight years, she worked in a Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital, where she was shaped by the nurses around her and by the disparities she witnessed daily. Seeing women's health needs overlooked, undertreated, and too often reduced to symptoms rather than systems, she recognized a gap that psychiatric nursing was uniquely positioned to address. That recognition brought her to nursing.

Claire chose Columbia University School of Nursing for its rigorous clinical training and commitment to health equity. She holds placements in reproductive psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine and in the Women's Mental Health program at Columbia ObGyn, and serves as a registered nurse in the inpatient geriatric psychiatry unit at Gracie Square Hospital. Beyond her clinical work, she is actively engaged in the broader CUIMC community through interdisciplinary collaborative initiatives across Columbia's health sciences schools. She also volunteers with the Columbia University Care Access Project (CCAP), Columbia Student Medical Outreach (CoSMO), and the Columbia Human Rights Initiative Asylum Clinic (CHRIA), where she provides physical and psychological screenings for asylum seekers, work that has deepened her understanding of the structural barriers facing the most vulnerable patients. She is a recipient of the Johnson & Johnson Nursing Leadership and NPHF/Procter & Gamble
Community Service scholarships.

Claire's scholarly interests extend to how AI-driven tools will shape psychiatric care and who will bear the risks when those tools are deployed in under-resourced and marginalized communities. Her DNP capstone examines digital health technologies through a clinical psychiatric lens, and she is currently completing a summer science internship at Ema EQ, a women's health AI company, where she is building practical expertise at the intersection of technology and women's health. She has an accepted podium presentation at the 2026 APNA Annual Conference on algorithmic justice in mental health nursing.

Receiving the Madeline A. Naegle Scholarship means more to Claire than recognition alone. Dr. Naegle's career, spanning two Fulbright Awards, a WHO Collaborating Center, and decades of advocacy at the intersection of psychiatric nursing, substance abuse, and global health, represents the kind of clinician-scholar-advocate Claire is working to become. To be seen by a scholarship bearing her name is, for Claire, both an honor and a challenge: an invitation to grow into that legacy.