Janice Carrol Humphreys
Professor Emerita in the School of Nursing

Janice Humphreys, PhD, RN, FAAN, is a Professor in the School of Nursing. She came to Duke in 2013 from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Nursing, where she was Professor and Vice-Chair for Academic Personnel in the Department of Family Health Care Nursing. From 2013 until 2018, Dr. Humphreys served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Duke University School of Nursing. Dr. Humphreys earned bachelor’s degrees in both nursing and psychology at Purdue University, and then completed her M.S. in pediatric nursing at UCSF with support from a National Health Service Corps Scholarship. She subsequently contributed two years of service as a pediatric nurse practitioner at the Guilford County (North Carolina) Health Department then moved to Detroit, where she taught and completed her PhD at Wayne State University. She taught for six years at Eastern Michigan University and then returned to UCSF as a member of the faculty in 1994. Her UCSF career was distinguished by excellence in research, teaching, and community service, and by leadership in shared governance responsibilities of the School of Nursing, the UCSF campus, and the University of California system.

Dr. Humphreys’ research focuses on the health effects of intimate partner violence on women and their children and is rooted in over 30 years of nursing practice with these vulnerable populations. Initially her research described the breadth and depth of multidimensional responses to violence (including resilience) in battered women and their children. Her most recent studies address chronic pain, depression, lifetime trauma exposure, and posttraumatic stress disorder in abused women as well as the relationship between intimate partner violence and telomere length, a measure of cell aging. She is recognized nationally and internationally as an expert on intimate partner violence, and has an extensive record of collaborative research in this field with colleagues from all over the world.

As a long-standing member of the UCSF Center for Symptom Management, Dr. Humphreys has also been instrumental in development of the Theory of Symptom Management. Interest in this theory and its implication for intervention research has grown, and she has presented on this subject recently in Switzerland and China. She has taught courses at both the master’s and doctoral levels on symptom management, qualitative research methods, theory development, and family violence.

Dr. Humphreys’ publications include over 80 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters, several of which have won national or international awards. She is the co-editor (with Jacquelyn Campbell) of Family Violence and Nursing Practice, a text developed to serve as a resource for undergraduate, graduate, and practicing health care professionals, which is now in its 2nd edition (2011). For many years she served on the board of the Nursing Network on Violence Against Women International. She is a founding member of the Enfermeras del Anillo del Pacifico en Investigación sobre Violencia de Pareja [Nursing Research on Pacific Rim Intimate Partner Violence]. Dr. Humphreys is a charter member and former Board Member of the Academy on Violence and Abuse. In 2006, she was inducted as a Fellow of American Academy of Nursing, and she has served as Co-chair for the Academy’s Expert Panel on Violence.

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