Elizabeth Restrepo, Ph.D., RN

Elizabeth Restrepo has been a full-time faculty member on the Denton campus of Texas Woman’s University since 2010. She currently teaches in the PhD and Masters programs and her responsibilities include supervising doctoral dissertations and teaching doctoral-level courses including Theory and Research, Quantitative Nursing Research, and Multicultural Nursing, with a focus on global health. She also teaches the nursing informatics courses Analysis of Nurse-Generated Data and Data Applications for Health Promotion, at both the doctoral and master’s levels. Elizabeth teaches in the 100% online doctoral program and works with students, both local and international, in all of her courses. She became involved with the CGNS in 2016. Prior to assuming her full-time faculty position, she worked as a Clinical Consultant/Data Analyst for Texas Health Resources, serving rural and urban hospitals in the DFW Metroplex, and as an adjunct faculty member at TWU.

Dr. Restrepo has spent most of her 44-year nursing career in Maternal-Child Health. Her clinical practice has varied from labor and delivery and high-risk obstetrics to infection control and prenatal education. For almost ten years, Dr. Restrepo lived near the Texas-Mexico border and served a largely Hispanic population as a home health nurse, caring for patients from the Gulf Coast to the Rio Grande. As an educator in a south Texas clinic, serving a mostly immigrant population, she developed a program of prenatal education addressing nutrition during pregnancy, breast feeding, and maternal-infant bonding. She sometimes taught with the assistance of an interpreter when her Spanish skills were inadequate. With her husband and family, she has traveled throughout Colombia on three occasions and has visited healthcare facilities in Medellin and Bogota. Her plans include a return visit to Colombia and, hopefully, to Peru, in the near future.

Dr. Restrepo’s program of research involves the study of factors that contribute to maternal and neonatal mortality. With her research team, she has examined maternal obesity, near miss and failure to rescue in a maternal population, quality of care, hospital level of technology, nursing workforce issues, and off-peak birth. With the rising rate of maternal mortality in the state of Texas, Dr. Restrepo and her team are currently examining maternal risk factors and demographic characteristics including patient age, nationality, and ethnicity. She has presented her research findings throughout the United States and internationally, in Scotland and in the Netherlands.

Professionally, Dr. Restrepo is an active member of many organizations including the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN); Sigma Theta Tau; the Southern Nursing Research Society (SNRS); the American Nurses Association; and the Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science (CANS). She is an Educational Affiliate of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and serves as a grant reviewer for CANS and an abstract reviewer for SNRS. She has also served as a corresponding member of the AWHONN Research Advisory Panel and as a member of the Infant Mortality Task Force Research and Oversight committee of the Catholic Charities Healthy Start Program. As a community volunteer, Dr. Restrepo has worked with Planned Parenthood, the Arlington Women’s Shelter, and the Tarrant County Food Bank. She spent 15 years as a volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America, serving as a camp nurse, den mother, and badge instructor. She currently serves as advisor to the TWU Pre-Nursing Organization, working with undergraduate students hoping to pursue a career in nursing.

Page last updated 10:40 AM, May 17, 2018