When Diana Bowser arrived at the Connell School of Nursing (CSON) as associate dean for research and integrated science in 2023, she set out to develop a framework for scientific inquiry to take the school into the future. As part of this initiative, Bowser held several forums and meetings, where she asked faculty questions including how they define nursing research.
“Everyone kept repeating this phrase: We do research for the common good,” she says.
Throughout history, philosophers and theologians have offered varying explanations of “the common good.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”
Bowser has asked CSON scientists to describe how they view the concept. “Everyone defines it differently,” she says. “But I think that’s the point. Each researcher at CSON is using their research—whether they’re focused on diabetes, heart disease, mental health, or any other condition—to improve health care services for the common good.”
Those sentiments inspired the name of the new framework: Research for the Common Good: Discovery and Implementation of Nursing Science, Public Health, and Health Equity. CSON faculty helped identify the half-dozen essential (and often connected) areas of expertise, or hubs as Bowser calls them, within that framework.
Voice spoke with six CSON researchers about how their work fits into their own specific hub and how it relates to the others as they pursue healthier lives for all.
“Public health and the common good are really one,” says Associate Professor Katelyn Sileo of CSON’s Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good. “A key goal of public health research is to create policies and programs that put the wellness and health of the community first.”
Katelyn Sileo
That includes the global community. Sileo’s research has taken her to Uganda, a country with high unintended pregnancies and related maternal mortality. She developed an intervention to address these issues through the promotion of family planning. Through a program called Family Health = Family Wealth, she says, “we’re trying to break down the barriers to planning and spacing pregnancies, such as challenging men’s perception that having many children is a sign of masculinity.” The intervention increased contraceptive use among women who wanted to prevent pregnancy. That pilot study is now being tested in a larger group.
Sileo notes that because preventive medicine is at the core of public health, this pillar of the Research for the Common Good framework overlaps with several others. “For example, prevention is a key aspect of chronic disease and women and children’s health,” she says, “so they naturally intersect with public health approaches.”
The era of genomic medicine that began with the sequencing of the human genome in 2003 has enabled the development of precision therapies—treatments tailored to an individual’s genetic makeup.
Andrew Dwyer
Yet most nurses receive little education about genomics, says Associate Professor Andrew Dwyer. His Macy Faculty Scholar project developed and tested first-of-its-kind simulations to help nurse practitioner students develop genomic nursing competencies and build confidence in applying genomic knowledge in their practice.
Dwyer and Assistant Professor Melissa Uveges are part of an international team that created the ACCESS framework to integrate genomics across the continuum of nursing care. Dwyer is currently working with nursing leaders to establish a consensus statement on genomic content for nursing curricula so schools lacking genomics expertise can still incorporate content into the curriculum. “The goal isn’t for this knowledge to remain at BC, but to be the tide that raises all boats and increases access and health equity,” says Dwyer.
By 2034, Americans over 65 will outnumber children under 18 for the first time, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Professor Karen Lyons, a gerontologist, notes that while medical advances have increased life expectancy, many people may live longer with chronic diseases that require care. “Increased longevity is exciting,” says Lyons, “but it also poses huge challenges for our health care systems, for society, and for our families.”
Karen Lyons
Lyons’s research focuses on enhancing the well-being of people in family care dyads, which are made up of a person with a chronic illness and a close family member, such as a spouse or an adult child, who acts as caregiver. She has shown that improving communication and collaboration within a dyad that includes a person living with heart failure results in better physical and mental health for both patient and caregiver, and she’s studying similar interventions for dyads that include people with dementia and people with cancer.
“BC has a really rich, long history of aging-related research,” says Lyons. “We have a collaborative, innovative team of researchers that is laser-focused on addressing the holistic needs of older adults as they age.”
CSON’s launch of a master’s program in nurse-midwifery this year underscores the school’s commitment to maternal health care and research, says Bowser.
Brittney van de Water
That commitment crosses international borders, notes Brittney van de Water, an associate professor and pediatric nurse practitioner who studies global health delivery. More than 90 percent of all maternal deaths occur in low-income countries, according to the World Health Organization, while sub-Saharan Africa has the highest neonatal mortality rate in the world. “A lot of these deaths are preventable,” says van de Water. “We know how to fix a lot of the problems that are causing them.”
But implementing evidence-based prevention strategies is often a challenge, she says. She is conducting a two-year study of children in South Africa who have been treated for tuberculosis (TB) to understand the long-term effects on their lung function and quality of life. Her team is tracking pediatric TB survivors to determine if exposure to certain volatile organic compounds causes relapses.
More than half of all Americans have two or more chronic diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so learning how to curb and manage those conditions is a foundational aspect of nursing education and research, says Associate Professor Tam Nguyen.
Tam Nguyen
“It underscores the question of how we help individuals make healthier choices,” says Nguyen, who has focused on finding ways to slow fast-rising rates of type 2 diabetes (T2D) among Asian Americans. In summer 2025, she launched the Asian Diabetes Wellness Collective, a resource-rich web portal with culturally adapted information (in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese) about preventing and managing T2D through lifestyle changes.
Nguyen notes that critical research on chronic disease prevention and management across CSON connects many hubs within the new research framework. By working with campus groups outside CSON—such as the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society and Design Commons (a Provost Office collective integrating design-driven approaches with interdisciplinary problem-solving)—Nguyen says that faculty and students alike can pursue new directions in scientific inquiry. “There are many opportunities here at BC to work creatively across disciplines,” she adds, “and do research for the common good.”
Boston College’s emphasis on cura personalis—care for the whole person, including the psyche—was important to Assistant Professor Victor Petreca, a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, when he came to CSON in 2018.
Victor Petreca
Much of his research focuses on victims and perpetrators of violence and crime. In a recent study of 200 cases of strangulation, Petreca identified the methods and motives of four distinct types of perpetrators. In other research, he has examined violence against Indigenous women and the long-term effects of male sexual trauma. “The goal is to prevent victimization, but also to try to identify those who are at risk of perpetrating violence and figuring out if we can push the brakes on that train,” says Petreca. The core of his research is crisis intervention and jail diversion, and he leads a center that studies how to improve policing and promote mental health.
Petreca also collaborates with Professor Ann Burgess, whose groundbreaking research influenced how law enforcement investigates serial killers. He stresses that there’s a mental health component throughout the scholarship represented by the pillars of CSON’s new research framework, such as healthy aging, chronic disease, and women and children’s health. “If you’re interested in looking at people fully, you should come to Connell,” says Petreca.
Petreca and his investigator colleagues at CSON each have specialized areas of focus that don’t always fit neatly into a single hub, which Bowser says is a strength of the Research for the Common Good framework. “In order to do research for the common good, we must think outside of our silos and be interdisciplinary. That’s how we’re going to solve the problems of the future.”