Terry Fulmer, MS'77, PhD'83

For more than three decades, Terry Fulmer has been dedicated to preventing elder abuse and neglect. A leading expert in geriatrics, she was the first nurse to be elected to the board of the American Geriatrics Society and the first nurse to serve as president of the Gerontological Society of America. Focused on nursing from the start, Fulmer earned her bachelor’s degree in clinical nursing from Skidmore College and developed an interest in geriatrics soon thereafter as a staff nurse at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. At BC, she began her research on detecting and preventing elder abuse and neglect, joining the faculty of the Connell School of Nursing as an assistant professor before completing her PhD—and returning in 2010 as the inaugural speaker of the school’s Pinnacle lecture series.

Fulmer is a professor and dean of the Bouve College of Health Sciences at Northeastern University, a visiting professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and an adjunct professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. She is also dean emerita of New York University College of Nursing, where she earlier served as the Erline Perkins McGriff Professor of Nursing and founding dean, and she has held faculty appointments at Columbia University, Yale University, and the Harvard Division on Aging. Her clinical appointments have included the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the NYU-Langone Medical Center, and she further serves as an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, as vice chair of the New York Academy of Medicine, and as a board member of Bassett Hospital, Skidmore College, and the Institute for Health Improvement.