About
Dr. Whitfield is an Assistant Professor in the Community Nursing Department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She completed her initial nursing training at the University of Vermont, followed by a PhD in Nursing from Queen’s University in Canada. She also holds an MEd in Interdisciplinary Studies, and is a graduate of the Vermont Leadership Institute through the Snelling Center for Government at the University of Vermont. Her clinical work as a family nurse practitioner has been as a primary care provider at a rural federally qualified health center, and now on an inpatient addiction treatment service in Fall River, Massachusetts. Her program of research centers issues of equity and access to healthcare with a focus on harm and risk reduction approaches to substance use and related issues in primary care and community settings. She is interested in the development of nursing roles within both biomedical and social domains, and in the potential of nurse practitioners to increase access to treatment for substance use disorders. Her clinical work allows her to bring an advanced practice nursing clinical lens to the development of research questions and informs her interest in nursing responses to the opioid epidemic.
Dr. Whitfield was the recipient of a 2024 National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Young Investigator Travel Award and the 2024 Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Council of Ontario Colleges of Nursing. She is a clinical affiliate with the University of Vermont Center on Rural Addiction, where she collaborates on supporting rural providers in treating substance use disorders.