Lucille Sowko

Lucille Sowko, PhD, RN, MsEd, CHSE, an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing, specializes in interprofessional education and health promotion. With 20+ years in undergraduate nursing education and 30 years of clinical experience in medical-surgical nursing, she leads the Transitions into Professional Nursing Practice course and co-developed a NIH-funded interdisciplinary partnership with bioengineering students. Her work emphasizes clinical input in medical product design, evidenced by co-authorship of a 2025 open-access study demonstrating improved design self-efficacy and interprofessional collaboration.

• Clinical Expertise: Medical-surgical nursing, Renal/GI disorders, Trauma
• Research Focus: Interprofessional education, health promotion, biomedical innovation
• Awards: Excellence in Teaching Award, Innovations in Education Award
• Service: Sigma Theta Tau (STT) chapter representative, church nurse, interdisciplinary coordinator for courses

Key Partnerships: Co-created the University of Pittsburgh's "Maker’s Space" to foster nursing-engineering collaboration, culminating in solutions like neonatal nasal cannula dislodgement detection systems and foley bag improvements. Her NIH grant Team Based Design in Biomedical Engineering Education (R25 EB025793-01) formalizes this work, showing statistically significant gains in student confidence and teamwork competencies.