The University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies welcomes four new faculty members as the Spring 2025 semester begins. “Please extend our new faculty members a warm welcome,” said Dean Hudson Santos. “Their wealth of experience and dedication is strongly aligned with our school’s mission to transform lives and health care through education, research, innovation, and service across the hemisphere. After many extremely positive discussions last year, I’m excited to see their considerable individual and collective talents in action as we kick off a New Year and semester.” The titles and brief biographical summaries of these new faculty members follow.
María de los Ángeles Ortega Hernández, D.N.P., APRN, GNP-BC, PMHNP-BC, CNS, CDP, FAANP, FAAN, joins the school as associate dean for graduate clinical programs and professor of clinical. For the past decade, she was director of the Louis and Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center (MWC) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and in 2024 became the CEO of the FAU/Northwest Community Health Alliance Community Health Center in West Palm Beach. In addition, Dr. Ortega was an associate dean of clinical practice and professor in the practice teaching track at FAU’s Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. Her innovative thinking and demonstrated leadership in clinical care, scholarship, teaching, research, and policy development have resulted in health care advances for Latinx and other vulnerable populations in the United States and globally. A Fellow of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners and of the American Academy of Nursing, Dr. Ortega was named an AAN Edge Runner in 2021 for “Caring Science Model of Specialized Dementia Care for Transforming Practice and Advancing Health Equity.” She is a board certified Gerontological and Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, Clinical Nurse Specialist, and Certified Dementia Practitioner whose clinical specialties include gerontology, psychiatry, and mental health. Her scholarly endeavors are aimed at improving health outcomes of older adults transitioning from the hospital to skilled nursing facilities post-open heart surgery and with cognitive impairment. Ortega’s continuing postdoctoral work is focused on enhancing and sustaining specialized long-term care services and supports through excellence in clinical practice and integrated care coordination. She has initiated or participated in 22 externally funded grants in the areas of Alzheimer’s disease, home-based care, advance care planning, psychiatric and mental health, and community outreach. Her philanthropic efforts have raised millions of dollars supporting the MWC. She has led and facilitated clinical practicum experiences at the MWC for nursing, medical, and social work students. She holds B.S.N., M.S., and D.N.P. degrees from FAU and earned her post-graduate psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner degree from Johns Hopkins University.
Frank Guido-Sanz, Ph.D., APRN, ANP-BC, AGACNP-BC, CHSE, FAANP, joins the school as associate dean for simulation education and research and professor of clinical, will focus on expanding education, research, and corporate partnerships contributed by S.H.A.R.E. Simulation Hospital Advancing Research & Education®. Dr. Guido-Sanz was a tenured associate professor and the graduate simulation coordinator at the University of Central Florida College of Nursing. A Certified Healthcare Simulation Educator®, he is a member of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare and International Nursing Association of Clinical and Simulation Learning. He chaired and co-chaired the Simulation Special Interest Group of the National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties, which presented him its Outstanding Research Award in 2020. Guido-Sanz has been an intensivist nurse practitioner since 2006, with clinical experience in critical care and intensive care. He was an active member of the National Disaster Medical System’s Trauma and Critical Care Team for over 20 years, leveraging clinical expertise as lead nurse practitioner on several national and international deployments to provide care to disaster victims. His research focus is on the use of simulation to improve outcomes in acute and critical care, trauma, disaster health (including mass casualties), combat casualties, and nursing education. He is co-inventor of three patented wound simulation systems with several others under review and is involved in several research collaborations related to graduate education and training for acute care, trauma, and combat and disaster casualties. He developed a medical handoff tool for the uniformed services that was tested and published, and several diagnostic and intervention algorithms for training systems using voice recognition technology to aid in the care of combat casualties. Guido-Sanz earned his B.S.N. from Barry University in Miami. He holds M.S.N. and Ph.D. degrees from Florida International University, and in 2024 received FIU’s Distinguished Alumni Award for Excellence in Nursing Innovation. He completed Adult/Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner and Nurse Educator certificates, plus an International Family-focused Healthcare Certificate in Family-Focused Interdisciplinary Healthcare Across Cultures from the Sapienza University of Rome.
Wonsuk Yoo, Ph.D., was hired as a research associate professor, biostatistician. Before joining the school, he was an associate professor in the Department of Translational Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute and director of the Ivy Brain Tumor Center Biostatistics Program in Phoenix, Arizona. He also led the institute’s Biostatistics Core Shared Resources. Dr. Yoo, who was named a Young Investigator presented by the American Statistical Association in 2005, is an experienced biostatistician and population health scientist. His expertise is in clinical trial study designs related to intervention studies and drug therapeutic studies, population-based cancer research, and data-driven health disparity studies. His research aims to develop statistical and quantitative methods and conduct collaborative research to develop novel approaches to address real-world problems in health, cancer, and medicine. Throughout his career, he has used biostatistical and quantitative methods to reduce health disparities using national survey databases (NHANES/NIS/BRFSS), cancer registry data (SEER/NCTR), health services and Medicare data, BioLINCC, FITBIR, and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). His current research includes post-hoc go/no-go decisions based on artificial neural network based modeling for single-arm trials of rare diseases, health disparities research on the development of disparity metrics/indicator(s) based on disease burden and economic burden, data-driven disease progression modelling including imaging and genomic data for neurodegenerative diseases, causal inference using machine learning algorithm, cost prediction modeling in dementia and Alzheimer disease, and population-based, data-driven research using public-access big databases. As an educator, Dr. Yoo has over 15 years of graduate and training program teaching experience in biostatistics, epidemiology, and research method courses based on evidence-based instruction and novel educational technologies in biostatistics and data science. He also has a keen interest in continuing to develop web-based resources in biostatistics and research methods for students and researchers. He is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Statistics Association, and the American Public Health Association. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in biostatistics from the Medical University of South Carolina, Master of Science in statistics from the University of Florida, and Bachelor of Arts in social science from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.
Already a long-time member of the Hurricanes family, alumna Marva Hodges Louisville, D.N.P. ’23, has been named a senior lecturer in the school’s B.S.N.-D.N.P. Nurse Anesthesia Program. She is a Certified Healthcare Simulation Educator® who has worked with the school as a health care simulation educator since 2022, a part-time lecturer since 2023, and a clinical faculty and faculty advisor since August 2024. As a proud staff CRNA with the University of Miami Medical Group since 2017, Louisville provides anesthesia care to surgical patients. In addition, she draws on more than two decades of clinical CRNA experience to educate, precept, and mentor student registered nurse anesthetists (SRNAs). After earning her B.S.N. from Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisville joined the United States Air Force. As a Captain and critical care nurse, she provided advanced, high-acuity care to critically ill or injured military personnel and beneficiaries, collaborated with multidisciplinary teams to develop and implement patient care plans, and provided leadership, mentorship, and training to junior nursing officers and enlisted medical technicians. She then served as a major in the US Army Reserve’s 405th Combat Support Hospital for almost two decades. As a civilian, Louisville has participated in medical aid trips to Belize, Haiti, and Cambodia. She earned her Master of Science in Anesthesia through Xavier University in New Orleans and her M.S.N.-D.N.P. from the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies.
