Dr. Mercedes Echevarria joins GW this fall as an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of the DNP program. She comes to GW Nursing from Rutgers University, where she served as associate dean of Advanced Nursing Practice. Under her leadership, the school was ranked within the top 20 best graduate nursing programs in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in 2017.
Dr. Echevarria is a fellow of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) -Wharton Executive Leadership Program and AACN’s Leadership for Academic Nursing Program. Her research and clinical interests include improvement of health outcomes with an emphasis on the pediatric population, childhood developmental surveillance and screening, childhood obesity, DNP Program outcomes and advanced nursing practice.
Dr. Echevarria holds a bachelor’s degree in health care administration from Rutgers University, and both her master’s degree in nursing and her doctorate in nursing practice at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. She also earned post-master’s certificates as a family nurse practitioner and as a pediatric nurse practitioner from the Rutgers University School of Nursing. Dr. Echevarria is board certified as an Adult Nurse Practitioner and a Family Nurse Practitioner by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner by the Pediatric Nursing Certification Board.
She has sustained an active practice as a Nurse Practitioner while maintaining fulltime faculty and administrative responsibilities and presently remains active in the clinical setting through her work as an Advanced Practice Nurse at a nurse-managed FQHC in Newark, New Jersey.