Kate Yeager is an Associate Professor, tenured, and joined the faculty at the School of Nursing in September of 2012. She earned a doctoral degree in nursing at the Emory University in 2012, a master's degree in nursing and oncology at the University of California San Francisco in 1993, and a bachelor's degree in nursing at Emory University in 1984. As a nurse clinician and researcher, Dr. Yeager works to improve the quality of life for individuals with chronic diseases. In addition, she focuses on understanding and eliminating health disparities. Her program of research seeks to examine and improve the symptom and treatment experience for individuals with cancer, specifically targeting pain and treatment adherence.  This includes qualitative work with African Americans with cancer to explore their experience of managing symptoms and reasons for not taking pain medications as prescribed. In addition, she completed a K01 (Adherence in African Americans Being Treated for Cancer Pain) to enhance her  understanding of medication adherence including the importance of assessing the dynamic patterns of adherence to understand the reasons how and why individuals take opioids to manage pain. Dr. Yeager’s current  NCI funded R01 builds on her work in medication adherence and plans to characterize adherence trajectories of oral chemotherapy in individuals being treated for chronic myeloid leukemia and then determine how symptoms and financial toxicity influence these adherence trajectories. Both the K01 and R01 are mixed method studies; Kate values this approach and has gained expertise in combining data to create meaningful findings.  In addition to her research, she has co-authored over 50 manuscripts and four book chapters. At the nursing school, Kate enjoys serving as  co-coordinator of the BSN Honors Program and mentoring students across all programs. Kate is the assistant program director of the PhD program and works to improve the student experience.

Yeager, K.A & Bauer-Wu, S. (2013). Cultural Humility: Essential Foundation for Clinical Researcher. Applied Nursing Research, 26(4),251-256.

McGuire, D.B., Reifsnyder, J., Soeken, K., Kaiser, K.S., & Yeager, K. A. (2011). Assessing Pain in Non-responsive Hospice Patients: Development and Preliminary Testing of the Multidimensional Objective Pain Assessment Tool. Journal of Palliative Medicine,14(3) 287-292.

Bauer-Wu, S., Yeager, K., Norris, R.L., Liu, Q., Habin, K.R., Hayes, C., & Jurchak, M. (2009). Communication and planning at the end of life: A survey of women with advanced stage breast cancer.Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 2(4), 371-376.

More publications on the NIH website

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