Wendy Grube, PhD, CRNP, Practice Associate Professor (effective July 1, 2016), has been appointed Director of the Center for Global Women’s Health. She has a long-standing commitment to global women’s health as demonstrated through her leadership in women’s health research, teaching, and practice.

Grube’s research has focused on promoting access to essential preventive health care for underserved populations, and has informed state and regional providers and advocacy groups in the development of culturally-appropriate strategies to decrease preventable deaths from cervical cancer in rural Appalachia. This work created a foundation for development of a community collaboration and a sustainable government-subsidized cancer screening site for uninsured women in West Virginia. This screening program has allowed hundreds of never or rarely-screened women residing in an economically depressed rural region access to high quality, no-cost care provided by advance practice registered nurses. The project was recognized regionally and nationally as a best practice model, and internationally (through the World Health Organization) as an exemplar of nurses working with communities to improve health.

Internationally, Grube has directed a team of health care professionals from IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health (ICTPH) to develop an evidence-based, allopathic clinical education program to expand the diagnostic and treatment capacity of traditional non-allopathic Indian practitioners in rural areas. This Bridge Training Project in Tamil Nadu, India trains AYUSH (non-allopathic traditional Indian health practitioners) college graduates to provide quality, affordable, accessible, and culturally appropriate primary health care for rural peoples of India and serves as a model for critically needed basic health care throughout rural India. As Director of Penn Nursing’s Women’s Health/Gender Related Care Nurse Practitioner program, Grube prepares students to become nurse practitioners and to explore the social determinants that affect women’s lives locally and globally through public policy, advances in practice and technology, and ongoing research. She teaches courses on women’s health and primary care; a course on complementary and alternative therapies and is Director of the Comparative Health Systems course in Thailand.

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