Brennan Parmelee, PhD(c), MSN, RN, CNE, awarded the Eleanor C. Lambertsen Scholarship, is a senior Stem Cell Transplant RN Coordinator at Houston Methodist Hospital. She received her BSN degree from The University of Texas at Austin, her MSN in Nursing Education from Duke University, and is currently a doctoral candidate in her PhD curriculum at The University of Texas Health Science Center Cizik School of Nursing.

Brennan’s practice experience has spanned ages from pediatrics to adult end-of-life care, and focuses primarily on patients with hematological cancer and those receiving stem cell transplants/cellular therapy. In her current position, she locates matches for patients who need life-saving bone marrow/stem cell transplants, coordinates transplants, and manages healthy marrow/stem cell donors through her institution (the third highest-grossing marrow donation center in the world.) She is pursuing a career in academia where she hopes to develop her program of research on psychosocial determinants of health in cancer survivorship. She is interested in cancer caregivers and patients as a dyadic unit, and her current research focuses on the interdependence of their health throughout the cancer trajectory. She hopes to identify psychosocial risks for health decline in cancer survivors, especially those in underserved/understudied populations, and develop interventions to mitigate those risks.

She is a member of Sigma Theta Tau International, The National League for Nursing, Infusion Nursing Society, and the Southern Nursing Research Society. She is involved in American Nursing Credentialing Center’s Magnet Program at her hospital, through which she helps develop peer inter-professional teams’ projects and presentations. She is passionate about education of the next generation of nurses, and she completed her MSN’s capstone project abroad in rural Tanzania, Africa where she taught senior nursing students’ modules on oncology and death/dying.

Brennan is a community educator for her local Leukemia Lymphoma Society, engages regularly with DKMS Delete Blood Cancer and Be the Match while registering life-saving bone marrow donors, and serves her institution on house-wide committees for development of nursing science and evidence-based practice. Brennan is looking forward to continuing her training toward independence as a young scientist, and hopes that her future career in academia is long, fruitful, and impactful for patients with hematological cancers.