26 W. Anapamu Office
NICU
Cindy graduated from Southwestern Oklahoma State University with a Bachelor of Science in Finance. Realizing rather quickly that the business world was not her calling, she returned to school and received her nursing degree from Oklahoma State University. Cindy has worked many years at hospitals throughout the country, primarily as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), but also spending some time in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and the mother infant unit. She received a Master of Science in Nursing from Sacred Heart University and is currently enrolled in the Doctor of Nursing Practice program at Azusa Pacific University.
From 2018 to 2022 Cindy participated in the Very Low Birthweight Project, a shared
continuous quality improvement project between Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital and the University of California at Santa Barbara. This project aimed to improve neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm infants and to mitigate the mental health sequelae of their parents. As an offshoot of that project, Cindy developed a project that aimed to improve the nurses’ use of developmental positioning techniques for infants in the NICU at Cottage Hospital. She disseminated the project through an article published in Neonatal Network: https://doi.org/10.1891/NN-2021-0047.
In 2022, seeing the nursing shortage looming and knowing the role nurses play in providing quality healthcare, Cindy felt it was time to use her experience and education to teach the next generation of nurses. She is honored to be a member of the nursing faculty at Westmont College who are dedicated to teaching future nurses how to provide safe and compassionate care. She still enjoys working a few days a month in the NICU at Cottage Hospital.