About Us

Welcome to excellence — and to open doors

In advancement of knowledge, in service to health, in care for people, there is but one standard here: constant, uncompromising excellence.

Join a culture of nursing leadership that fosters personal, professional and scholarly growth in an exceptional learning environment within a world-class health science center. This is a pivotal era for nursing — an exciting time filled with open doors.

• A nationwide nursing shortage means nurses are needed now more than ever and with increasing demand resulting from healthcare reform, the deficit won’t end soon.
• Health care reform has cast a bright spotlight on fundamentals — health promotion, illness prevention, wider access to basic care, care coordination, and more affordable costs — all of which describe the core mission of nurses since Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.
• Wide commitment to elevating care quality, patient safety and evidence-based practice creates new opportunities for nurses to contribute to population health.

Come learn with us, work with us and become an alumnus of a top-tier College of Nursing pledged to making a measurable difference in people’s health.

Please consider this your open invitation to call or visit to learn more about how we can help you meet your learning and career goals in nursing.

Juliann G. Sebastian, PhD, RN, FAAN Dean and Professor

• The College of Nursing is the largest and most far-reaching of UNMC’s six health colleges.
• We rank in the top tier of U.S. nursing schools.
• We have major presence and impact in all areas of Nebraska — and we influence the practice of nursing nationwide.
• We’re a leader in advanced, student-centered learning technologies.
• Despite a difficult economy, thanks to abundant donor vision and generosity, we’re solving the nursing shortage with a building boom unrivalled in the College’s nine-decade history.

The College of Nursing is the largest and most far-reaching of UNMC’s six health colleges, with:

• the most students — over 1,000 at undergraduate and graduate levels.
• the most programs — comprehensive offerings: bachelor’s, master’s, post-master's, doctoral, and continuing nursing education.
• the most campuses — five: serving Nebraska statewide, border to border.

We rank in the top tier of U.S. nursing schools in:

• academics — U.S. News, for example, has consistently listed us in the top 8% of graduate programs.
• grant funding — among the nation’s approximately 100 major schools of nursing, we rank 26^th out of 77 in National Institute of Health funding for 2012.

We have major presence and impact in all areas of Nebraska — and we influence the practice of nursing nationwide:

• We’ve educated over half of Nebraska’s bachelor-degreed nurses.
• Our nurse-managed health centers, including our mobile nurse managed clinic, bring important basic health services to poor, underserved and at-risk populations throughout the state.
• Through our Morehead Center for Nursing Practice, faculty members engage in innovative nursing practice that fills urgent needs within the service area of each campus city.
• We collaborate in multiple ways — including forward-thinking partnerships with area health, education, business and civic partners — to alleviate the nursing shortage and bring more options for primary, frontline care to rural and small-town Nebraska.
• We aggressively develop and support ways to get more nurses into service faster — through accelerated nursing programs, through faculty training programs and through myriad forms of financial aid, including:
• Scholarships funding — the college awarded over $4,000,000 in grants and scholarships in 2011-12.
• Our distinguished faculty includes noted experts in their fields and ten Fellows of the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN) — a relatively small, highly select, highly accomplished group of national nurse leaders.
• Together, our leading faculty members influence and advance the science of nursing through their teaching, research, practice and publication in peer-reviewed journals.

We’re a leader in advanced, student-centered learning technologies, including:

• interactive, activity-driven transfer of knowledge, skills and competencies.
• advanced simulated learning, including computer-programmable patient manikins for lifelike educational experience.
• web-based, distance-learning options —  our graduate students live throughout Nebraska and access the bulk of their learning online, satisfying clinical requirements in their local community or one nearby.

Despite a difficult economy, thanks to abundant donor vision and generosity, we’re solving the nursing shortage with a building boom unrivalled in the College’s nine-decade history.
Nationwide, the nursing shortage sprang from insufficient capacity — cramped, outdated facilities, not enough teachers and more qualified students than slots to educate them. Our solutions for Nebraska mean a big boost in student capacity, including:

• a $14-million, 5-story Center for Nursing Science, adjoining our existing facility on the Omaha campus.
• a 5^th division in Norfolk in 2010 for nurse-starved northeast Nebraska in a $11.9-million collaborative nursing education center, the fruit of a national-model partnership among area residents, the region’s health system, its community college and UNMC.
• facilities upgrades at our Scottsbluff campus serving Western Nebraska.
• NU Regents assigned highest priority to a new nursing building in Lincoln, replacing crowded rental space downtown. We expect that project to proceed when the economic outlook improves.
• a $15 million appropriation of state funds for a new Health Science Education Building on the University of Nebraska Kearney campus for our Kearney Division and programs from the UNMC School of Allied Health Professions.