معرفی
Melissa deCardi Hladek is an Assistant Professor and Principal Faculty in the Center for Equity in Aging at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. She also serves as Core Faculty for the University’s Center on Aging and Health and is affiliated with the Center for Cardiovascular & Chronic Care. Her expertise spans health equity, behavior change, and aging, with a focus on vulnerable populations and chronic conditions.
Dr. Hladek’s research examines how stress, self-efficacy, and sociocultural factors influence aging and multiple chronic conditions—particularly advanced kidney disease. She develops strengths-based, person-environment strategies to improve outcomes, emphasizing patient-centered care through initiatives like Patient Priorities Care (PPC), which has trained over 13,000 clinicians and students. Her work integrates symptom burden, functional limitations, and digital literacy into interventions co-created with participants.
Recent publications (2022-2023) reveal consistent themes across geriatrics, nephrology, and nursing: resilience in hemodialysis patients, loneliness impacts on self-efficacy, financial strain effects on inflammatory aging biomarkers, and pandemic-driven innovations in shared decision-making. These studies highlight her commitment to addressing social determinants of health and health disparities in aging populations.
Dr. Hladek’s accolades include:
- Butler Williams Fellow (2020) from the National Institute on Aging
- Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2018) from Johns Hopkins University
- Multiple NIH, American Heart Association, and John A. Hartford Foundation fellowships
- Leadership recognition from the National Association of Hispanic Nurses
She mentors DNP and PhD students while advising Latinx nursing student groups. Her NIH-funded research includes two pilot randomized control trials addressing symptom burden and digital literacy in older adults, supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, and John A. Hartford Foundation.
Dr. Hladek leads national dissemination of Patient Priorities Care (PPC) to nurse practitioners and contributes to the Pan-American Health Organization’s “Decade of Healthy Aging.” She maintains a clinical practice serving Spanish-speaking communities in Baltimore and collaborates with multi-disciplinary teams on Medicare modernization efforts, including TV campaigns generating over 1 million views and 25,000 congressional contacts.
