Heather Meissen is an Associate Professor, Clinical Track, for the Nell Woodruff Hodgson School of Nursing. She is also an Acute Care Nurse Practitioner in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at Emory University Hospital where she has been in practice since 2005. Heather received her Bachelors of Science in Biology-Psychology at Birmingham Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. She received her Masters of Science in Nursing from Vanderbilt University and her Doctorate of Nursing Practice with a focus on Healthcare Leadership and Nursing Education from Vanderbilt University. Heather has had a successful career in the healthcare setting as the founding program director of the Critical Care NP Fellowship at Emory Healthcare, which received the nation’s first accreditation as a practice transition program from the American Nurses Credentialing Center. She now serves as a Commissioner of Accreditation for the ANCC. She was also instrumental in the development of the Association of Post Graduate APRN programs, serving on their founding executive board and becoming the first president of APGAP. Heather is involved with many national organizations including the Society of Critical Care Medicine, in which she served as a Congress Co-Chair for the 2022 Virtual Congress and the Chair of the Best of SCCM which was hosted in Taipei, Taiwan in October, 2022.Her research interests focus on nurse practitioner workforce development, which include onboarding, training, retention and burnout. She also has a special interest in critical care staffing models which incorporate full scope of practice nurse practitioners.