Nakia C. Best

PhD, RN, FNASN, FAAN

Advocating for equitable access to full-time school nurses for all children and adolescents.

I am a Tenured Associate Professor at UC Irvine's Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing and a nurse scientist with 20+ years' RN experience. My research investigates the school health workforce and policy conditions determining which children have access to a school nurse, bridging peer-reviewed science with state & federal policy engagement. I serve as Vice Chair of the Health and Wellness Advisory Committee for the City of Irvine. I am an alumna of Winston-Salem State University, UNC Greensboro, Johns Hopkins, and UNC Chapel Hill.

School nursing policy expertise for state and federal legislators

As a 2026 UCDC Presidential Faculty Fellow, I work directly with policymakers on school health, school nursing workforce, and health equity for children and adolescents. Available to legislators, congressional and legislative staff, and policy organizations for briefings, expert testimony, and research-informed consultation.

Conference delegates gathered on stage beneath the 2026 Yonsei International Nursing Conference banner — Opening session, Grand Ballroom, Baekyang Nuri, Yonsei University

Over two days in Seoul, I presented an e-poster, sat in rooms with nurse leaders I've admired for years, and moderated a session alongside a colleague and fellow Tar Heel. The theme, Legacy of 120 Years: Honoring the Past, Paving the Future was spot on. There were 384 of us from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas celebrating Yonsei College of Nursing's huge milestone. We had the opportunity to collaborate through 34 oral presentations, 20 rapid poster presentations, and 163 e-posters, all pointing at what is next for nursing science.

Here's what I'm still thinking about, after the flight home

My e-poster

I brought my own work into the mix with an e-poster among the 163 on display.

Willing, but Under Resourced

School Nurse Perspectives on Cardiometabolic Risk Assessment in California K-12 Schools

Nakia C. Best · Cassidie S. Thomas

UC Irvine Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing

See My Yonsei Schedule 한국어로 보기

Nakia Best standing beside the e-poster kiosk displaying Willing, but Under Resourced — Presenting my e-poster at Baekyang Nuri, Yonsei University

Standing next to your work while researchers from a dozen countries stop to ask questions is its own kind of peer review — generous, curious, and a little humbling.

Lessons from the keynotes

The opening keynote session, Nursing Impact: Past, Present, and Future, paired Dean Emerita Linda McCauley (Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Emory University) and Dean Sarah Szanton (Johns Hopkins School of Nursing).

Dean McCauley made the case for the importance of colleges of nursing to be intentional about preparing scholars on how social and cultural factors impact health outcomes and demonstrating social responsibility through sustained community partnerships. I was super proud to see one of my mentors, Dr. Jill B. Hamilton's, work on social determinants of health highlighted during the session. Dean McCauley concluded with a charge to nurse leaders to provide resources to faculty in support of their community engaged research and experiential service-learning pursuits.

This was a perfect lead into Dean Szanton's keynote that provided real-world examples of how her research successfully shapes social change. In my handwritten notes, the line I underlined twice was:

Equity is not an outcome; it is a design requirement.

When designing our studies we need to ask who's included, excluded, and underpowered. Both numbers and stories are needed. That reframing spoke directly to my own work in school health, informatics, and equity.

The Global Nursing Leadership Forum

If the keynotes named the why, the leadership forum got specific about the how; how we develop the next generation of nursing scientists across borders.

Leaders from the Korean Society of Nursing Science, Yonsei University, Taipei Medical University, Fudan University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore, University of Illinois Chicago, and Emory University shared their perspectives on strengthening postdoctoral training and early-career researchers, including competencies, support systems, and global partnerships.

The session I moderated

The heart of it, for me, was moderating the GAINS concurrent session on Innovative Technology & Systems. I shared the table with Dr. Anna Lee (Professor at Yonsei), who happens to be a fellow UNC Chapel Hill School of Nursing alum. There's a particular joy in finding your Carolina family halfway around the world and running a room together like you'd done it a hundred times.

Nakia Best and Anna Lee seated at the moderator table with name cards and microphones — Co-moderating with Yonsei Prof. Anna Lee, GAINS Innovative Technology & Systems session

And what a room. Four presenters, one clear message: technology and innovation in service of patients and learners:

PhD Candidate Xiaolan Dong (University of Turku, Finland) co-designed Leukie: A Brave Adventure, using a design-thinking approach and workshops with children and parents to turn dietary management for kids with leukemia into a game.
Professor Hsiao-Yean Chiu (Taipei Medical University, Taiwan) shared a randomized controlled trial in which app-delivered brief behavioral treatment for insomnia demonstrated comparable efficacy to therapist-delivered care in traumatic brain injury survivors, scalable for a hard-to-reach population.
Professor Sunny Ruggeri (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA) mined SEER–Medicare data on more than 141,000 patients with decision-tree modeling to predict oral endocrine therapy non-adherence in breast cancer survivors, to guide nursing interventions toward who needs support the most.
Professor Ikseon Choi (Emory University, USA) tested whether a large vision-language model could automatically score nursing students' head-to-toe physical exams, with expert raters endorsing the AI's judgments, a promising approach to the faculty assessment bottleneck.

Coming home

Seoul skyline at dusk with Lotte World Tower rising above the Han River

Seoul, South Korea at dusk

I left Seoul with a full notebook, new collaborators, and a fuller sense of what I want to do next. This conference taught me to honor the past by naming what it taught us and pave the future by designing for equity, resourcing our people, and asking bigger questions of ourselves.

Nakia C. Best

Where my work lives

School Nursing

Health Informatics

Health Equity

Injury Prevention

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