CHERYL van DAALEN-SMITH, PhD, RN

NIGH Advisory Council

Dr. Cheryl van Daalen-Smith is the newly-appointed ​Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University. 
She started her beloved career as an acute care Pediatric Nurse, and soon saw the necessity of ensuring the voice of the child was heard and of the value of networking between nurses.  ​

To that end, she became the first nurse on the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children and founded the Ontario and Canadian Association of Pediatric Nurses fostering connections and promoting standards of practice that embraced children as citizens in their own rights. Her career shifted to working as a Public Health Nurse involving working with children, youth and women on a 1:1 basis as well as enacting principles of community development in order to collaboratively work towards the social determinants of health for all.
          Now an academic at Canada's York University, Dr. van-Daalen Smith is teaching nursing students in Baccalaureate, Masters and Doctoral Programs about the values and approaches of community health nursing — where social justice, upstream thinking and broad conceptions of quality of life build toward future nurses understanding their role as global health advocates.
​          She is thrilled to join the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health — as she continues her work with children’s studies, nursing and women’s studies students — to see the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a road map for protecting the rights of humans, nature [both animate and inanimate] and for promoting health. For as she is often heard reflecting to her cherished students, “If not us, then who?” She spends her ‘spare’ time caring for a menagerie of cast-away farm animals and fostering critical nursing scholarship through Witness: the Canadian Journal of Critical Nursing Discourse.

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