Nancy Hodgson, PhD, RN, FAAN, FGSA
Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor in Nursing
Nancy A. Hodgson, the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor in Nursing, is an internationally recognized nurse scientist whose work exemplifies the power of community-centered scholarship and mentorship. As department chair, Dr. Hodgson is widely recognized for fostering a culture of openness, collaboration, and inclusion. Through her mentorship, listening sessions, and intentional community-building efforts, she creates spaces where faculty, staff, and students feel heard, supported, and empowered to contribute their unique perspectives, continuing to strengthen the Penn Nursing community and advance compassionate, evidence-based care. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience, Dr. Hodgson’s research focuses on improving dementia care by promoting dignity, reducing distressing symptoms, and honoring the care preferences of patients and their families. Her work bridges research, education, and practice, advancing evidence-based interventions that support individuals living with dementia and the caregivers who support them. Through initiatives such as Project COPE and her leadership in implementation science, she has helped translate innovative behavioral interventions into real-world care settings.
What motivated you to focus specifically on aging and/or neurodegeneration in your research?
My path into this work was as a hospice and palliative care nurse and nurse practitioner, I sat with patients and families at the most difficult moments of this disease and what struck me wasn't just the complexity of dementia itself, but how underprepared everyone around the person felt. Families were doing enormous work with very little support, and the care systems around them weren't designed to help. That experience made it impossible for me to look away. Research felt like the only way to do something about it at scale.
Q&A with Dr. Hodgson:
What are the main goals you hope to achieve with your research?
"My work is about two things: helping people living with dementia maintain dignity and quality of life, and helping the families who care for them face that journey with confidence rather than crisis. Dementia caregiving is one of the most demanding things a family can go through physically, emotionally, financially. If my research can give caregivers concrete skills, practical tools, and the reassurance that they're not alone, that matters."
Are there any innovative techniques or technologies that have significantly helped your work?
"My research has always been grounded in biobehavioral science, understanding how biology and behavior interact, and how we use that understanding to design interventions that actually change people's lives. But what has genuinely transformed my work is implementation science. It shifted my thinking from asking 'does this intervention work?' to asking 'how do we get it to work, for whom, in what settings, and in a way that lasts?' Those are harder questions, but they're the right ones if you care about real-world impact."
What emerging fields or technologies do you think will have the biggest impact on neurodegenerative disease research in the next 5 to 10 years?
"I think the intersection of artificial intelligence and decision science is genuinely exciting and I say that as someone who came up through behavioral science, not computer science. We're beginning to use AI to detect early signs of caregiver burden from patterns in speech, to personalize activity recommendations for people with dementia, to flag risk before a crisis happens. The key is making sure it's built on rigorous science, tested with diverse populations, and deployed in ways that reduce inequity rather than compound it."
What has been the most challenging part of your research process so far?
"Moving evidence into real-world practice in a way that sticks. We have interventions that work. The science is solid. But getting them adopted consistently by health systems, home care agencies, community organizations, and in a way that's sustainable, that is genuinely hard. It requires a different kind of rigor than a clinical trial, and it takes years to develop the right frameworks and partnerships."
What's next for you in terms of future projects or research directions?
"I want to work at a different level of scale. We've spent decades building and testing individual programs now I want to change the conditions that determine whether evidence gets adopted at all. We need structured incubation environments, settings where we can generate pooled, cross-site evidence organized around shared goals, and build sustainability mechanisms into programs from the beginning rather than treating them as afterthoughts. My goal would be to develop a national adoption accelerator in dementia caregiving -a smarter infrastructure for getting that evidence where it needs to go."
Recent Achievements
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The 2026 Penn Nursing Faculty Awards: Dean’s Award for Strengthening Community
This award is for excellence in creating, promoting, and maintaining Penn Nursing’s values by cultivating an environment that recognizes, encourages, and effectively uses each individual’s talents.
Recent Publications
- Multi-State Implementation of the Alzheimer's Association Dementia Care Coordination (DCC) Program
- A historical look back to the present of policies supporting family caregivers: some progress, urgent action needed
- Non-inferiority of Online Versus In-Person Training for Health Professionals Delivering the COPE Dementia Care Program in PACE Settings