Ghada Abu Irsheed

Ghada Abu Irsheed, MSN, BSN, RN is the recipient of the 2022-2023 Evelyn J. Barclay Scholarship. She is currently a 4th year PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), College of Nursing (CON). She received her BSN in Nursing Science in 2007 and her MSN in 2011 -with a focus in Adult Critical Care - from Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan.

Mrs. Abu Irsheed has since then spent her career working in different critical care units as a Registered/In-Charge Nurse and Head-Nurse from 2007-2018, at King Abdulla University Hospital (KAUH) in Jordan. She has 2 years of teaching experience as a teacher assistant at the UIC/CON for different undergraduate nursing clinical courses. Beside her coursework and dissertation work, Mrs. Abu Irsheed is also working as a research assistant at the UIC/CON with multidisciplinary teams in two different R01 Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) funded by the NIH. These RCTs studying different innovative sleep interventions among type 1 diabetes and pregnant women populations. Additionally, Ghada is an active member within the Graduate Women in Science (GWIS), SIGMA Theta Tau (Alpha Lambda Chapter), Graduate Nursing Student Academy (GNSA/AANC), and Jordan Nurses and Midwives Council (JNMC).

Becoming a nurse scientist and faculty member in one of the U.S academic institutions has been Ghada’s goal for a long time. What motivated her at the beginning to choose the nursing profession was the thought of always caring for others and devoting her life to making someone’s day a little better. With all these numerous experiences helped her to develop her program of research. As a graduate PhD student in good standing, her goal is to accomplish her research project successfully. Abu’s research is centered on sleep, symptom management, and quality of life among adults with diabetes. Her project will focus on sleep behaviors among young adults with type 1 diabetes and how these sleep behaviors affect their glucose level. Ghada’s research will overcome the current limitations by using real time data such as Actigraphy for sleep data and continuous glucose monitoring data for different glucose parameters such as glycemic control and glycemic variability. Her dissertation work will focus on young adults because they are understudied, having the greatest sleep variability, and reporting poor sleep quality. By discovering these characteristics, Mrs.Irsheed’s future research will focus on sleep intervention programs that help this population and promote their glycemic control, therefore, having better quality of life.

Ghada is very grateful for this incredible scholarship opportunity that will support her throughout the remainder of her coursework and help her dissertation progression.