Alicia Kachmar currently practices as a registered nurse at a nursing home and is an assistant professor in the Practice track. She combines her clinical expertise and extensive teaching experience to help provide a strong and engaging foundation for entry-to-practice nursing students.
As someone who navigated the healthcare system as a chronically-ill patient without health insurance and eventually with Medicaid long before entering the nursing profession, Dr. Kachmar always approaches her nursing pedagogy and nursing care through the lens of health equity and social justice. Her dissertation work focused on socioeconomic status in pediatric health research and how it was associated with health outcomes. Since 2021, Dr. Kachmar has been the School of Nursing faculty lead for the Penn Rising Scholar Success Academy (PennRSSA) which is a free-of-charge college preparatory and career exploration program for Philadelphia high school students.
In addition, she sits on the board for the Legal Clinic for the Disabled and is a member of the Health Humanities Consortium’s Arts and Health Equity committee.
Dr. Kachmar teaches the foundational first-year BSN courses–NURS 1010 and 1020—as well as the senior level community/public health nursing course to BSN and MPN students (NURS 3820 and 5300). Additionally, she teaches a nursing elective–NURS 3050: Narrative Matters in Health & Illness Experiences—that forms the basis of the Health, History, and Humanities minor.
A full bio can be found here.