Mary Louise Affronti CV

Dr. Mary Lou Affronti is a Professor who joined the Duke University School of Nursing faculty in February 2014. She earned both her DNP and her MSN at DUSON, and additionally earned a Master’s degree in Health Science in Clinical Research from the Duke University School of Medicine. She holds a Clinical Associate faculty appointment in the Duke University Medical Center Department of Surgery /Neurosurgery. She is also Primary Investigator and Adult Nurse Practitioner at the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center in the Duke Cancer Institute.

Dr. Affronti has been a part of Duke’s oncology clinical and research community for almost three and a half decades, and has been associated with DUSON since 1989 in a variety of roles, including clinical associate, guest lecturer, preceptor, and clinical instructor. She was instrumental in developing the oncology curriculum for DUSON nurse practitioner students. In 2005, she was honored by the Friends of Nursing at Duke with the Evelyn Morgan Award for Excellence in Oncology Nursing. Dr. Affronti’s DNP capstone on adherence to antiemetic guidelines in patients with malignant glioma, received the Outstanding Capstone Doctoral Project Award in 2013, was published in Supportive Care in Cancer and was cited in a 2016 New England Journal of Medicine Antiemetic Review Article. Dr. Affronti was the Recipient of the Southern Nursing Research Society Clinical Research Award in 2018.

Dr. Affronti has been developing and leading therapeutic and supportive care research while seeing patients as a nurse practitioner, and is continuing both her clinical and research activities at the Brain Tumor Center. She has a strong interest in the development and testing of therapies and supportive care for primary brain tumors as a currently a co-principal or principal investigator on many Phase II clinical trials at the Duke Brain Tumor Center.