Nursing and Health Care Faculty Profiles

Tricia Jenkins is the University of Phoenix Area Chair for the College of Nursing in South Florida. With a background in critical care nursing, she teaches leadership and management courses along with critical care and research.

While Tricia enjoys the fast pace of working in a hospital, her love of people drives her to volunteer with hospice and abandoned children. She is also interested in energy study, practices healing touch and has recently become a Da Dao Chan Gong instructor.

Tricia has also recently pursued a career path that blends her clinical skills with her love of learning and making a difference. As current Director of Research and Development for an innovative company, Butterfly Effects, she is conducting research concerning the effects of environmental toxins and biomedical interventions.

Tricia holds a Ph.D. from University of Tennessee, Memphis; an MBA from Tulane University; and a Master of Science in Nursing from University of Tennessee. In addition, she is a member of Sigma Theta Tau (the honor society of nursing) and the Florida Nurses Association.

The information in this profile was provided by the subject.

Beverly Peterson has over 40 years of experience in counseling and nursing. She became a faculty member at University of Phoenix in 1997 and teaches nursing, counseling and general education courses at the San Diego Campus. She has also taught at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Beverly earned a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology and a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at the University for Humanistic Studies in California. She also earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and a Master of Science in Nursing from the University of California, San Francisco. Beverly is working toward her Master of Arts/Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Her expertise is in psychiatric nursing, as wells as transformational and depth psychology. Currently a licensed marriage and family therapist, Beverly conducts individual, group, couples and family therapy in a private practice. Previously, she was a staff nurse in medical-surgical nursing as well as a head nurse and supervisor in neurosurgery, orthopedics and psychiatry. She has also served as director of nursing at a psychiatric hospital.

Beverly co-authored the book How to Live with PTSD: The Causes and Characteristics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with her late husband, Richard W. Peterson.

JoAnn Zerwekh is an educator, author and consultant with over 40 years of experience in nursing. She primarily teaches graduate-level nursing practicum courses online. JoAnn is the executive director of a nursing education consultant company that publishes books and provides NCLEX review courses for graduate nurses. She holds a master's in nursing from University of Texas at Arlington and a Doctor of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M.

JoAnn is the author of numerous textbooks including "NursingToday: Transition and Trends" and eight volumes of "Memory Notebook of Nursing" review books for the RN and PN level, and is co-author of the graduate-level text "Essentials of E-learning for Nurse Educators." JoAnn also consults with nursing programs on curriculum development and analysis, as well as test construction and incorporating eLearning into the curriculum.

She is involved with state student nurse associations as an exhibitor and speaker and is a consultant for eLearning with Elsevier. She's been teaching with University of Phoenix since 1993.