Mary Louise Affronti CV

Dr. Mary Lou Affronti DNP, RN, MHSc, ANP, FAAN is a Clinical Professor, Assistant Dean of the Doctor of Nursing Practice Program and Director of the Oncology Specialty who joined the Duke University School of Nursing faculty in February 2014. She is the Adult Gerontology Nurse Practitioner and Oncology Specialty Lead Faculty. She earned both her DNP and her MSN at DUSON and additionally earned a Master of Health Science degree in Clinical Research from the Duke University School of Medicine. She held 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 over four 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 Project 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 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. In recognition of her many scholarly, teaching, service, and practice contributions, she was inducted as a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN) and was a Great 100 Nurses in North Carolina award recipient in 2020.  

Dr. Affronti has been developing and leading therapeutic and supportive care research while seeing patients in the consult setting 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 co-principal or principal investigator on many Phase II clinical trials at the Duke Brain Tumor Center. She was chairman of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC) guideline committee on Patient Antiemetic Guidelines and a member on the 2023 global antiemetic guideline committee. She is co-chair of the MASCC Antiemetic Study Group and a Society for Neuro-Oncology Board Member representative for the neuro-oncology advanced practice providers and allied health.