An exclusive interview: The big thinker pioneering international nurse innovation

I never even thought about nursing, to be honest. I didn't go to college after high school, but worked for a while for a variety of nonprofit organizations and AIDS service organizations. While working in a residential program for people with HIV/AIDS, mental illness, and substance abuse issues, I met a nurse who really changed my path, and changed my outlook on what nursing was and could be. Nursing has this weird, stereotypical public perception of what they are and what they do, and I had no idea. I thought it was just nurses working at the bedside who took orders from doctors and, and that was it. I got to know this nurse who was just incredibly knowledgeable, compassionate, autonomous, creative, innovative, and I immediately knew that was the profession for me. At the time I was living and working in Boston, and I decided to start taking classes and all the prereqs you need to apply to nursing school. I'm from Philly, so I decided to move back and really start looking at going to college. As soon as I got back, I still wasn't sure if nursing was for me - like I said, I didn't really know what nurses did and I really did not want to work at the bedside. Being a clinical nurse was not what I wanted to do, and because I didn't know you could do anything else with a nursing degree I kept taking other paths. Eventually, I saw a brochure that listed all these different things nurses were doing with their degrees. One of them was as a nurse researcher, and that was it: all the stars aligned. I've always loved science, I've always loved asking and answering questions, so bringing together nursing and research was it for me. I applied to that program, got in, and life has taken off from there.

Marion Leary is walking, talking, and teaching innovation. She is the director of innovation for the University of Pennsylvania's School of Nursing. She earned her master's degree in nursing at Penn in health leadership, a master's degree in public health at Penn, and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Nursing, focusing on innovation and technology. She’s been a contributor to the Huffington Post, host of a podcast or two, and in the last decade founded ImmERge Labs, LLC, which uses augmented and virtual reality platforms to reimagine how we prepare for emergencies, and Sink or Swim Philadelphia, a non-profit working to assist people who were uninsured or underinsured raise funds to pay for medical expenses using social media and medical crowd-funding.

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