Leadership Team
Dr. Kyle McInnis, Sc.D.
Inaugural Dean
Dr. Kyle McInnis spearheaded the creation of the School of Nursing and Health Sciences, pioneering innovative programs and reshaping education and healthcare. He previously started a new school of health sciences, which included a nursing program, as founding dean at Merrimack College. Before coming to PC, Dr. McInnis was provost at Johnson & Wales University, where he made a major impact on expanding the breadth of that institution’s academic and research portfolio and led several successful health program accreditation initiatives.
Dr. McInnis spent most of his early career as a faculty member and clinical researcher in Boston’s acclaimed academic medical community. His primary area of expertise is in physical activity, clinical exercise physiology, and the prevention of chronic cardiovascular and lifestyle-related disease conditions. He has received funding for numerous research grants and an honor award from the U.S. Surgeon General for promoting children’s health.
Deborah Levine, Ph.D.
Associate Dean
Dr. Deborah Levine has spent the past thirteen years of her distinguished career at Providence College. After serving as chair for the department of health sciences (formerly health policy and management) she was recently appointed to serve as the inaugural associate dean of the school. Trained as a historian of science in the Harvard University Department of the History of Science, her research focuses on the history of medicine and disease in the United States. Her dissertation was awarded the Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Award in History of Medicine or Biomedical Sciences by the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2011. After graduate school, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Andrew Mellon Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry program at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2020 Dr. Levine awarded the 2020 Joseph R. Accinno Faculty Teaching award.
Dr. Levine researches and publishes on the history of diet, nutrition, and obesity in the United States, and how that history has shaped and continues to inform public health and food policy. Other research interests include the histories of health policy, medical education, and patient experiences of disease.
In the School of Nursing a Health Sciences, she teaches introductory courses on the US health care system as well as upper-level research seminars on nutrition, ideas of disease prevention, and patient experience of illness.
Nancy Meedzan, DNP, RN, CNE, NEA-BC
Inaugural Chair, Department of Nursing
Nancy L. Meedzan, DNP, RN, CNE, NEA-BC was named chair of the Department of Nursing in February 2023 and began her tenure in June 2023. Dr. Meedzan is a proven leader with vast clinical knowledge and a demonstrated commitment to high-quality nursing education. She comes to Providence College from the Cummings School of Nursing and Health Sciences at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she was Dean since January 2019.
After graduating from Boston College in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in nursing, Meedzan began a nearly 20-year nursing career working as a registered nurse at several Rhode Island and Massachusetts hospitals and medical facilities. A committed scholar whose primary interest is in global health, Meedzan is co-investigator of an international study on the impact of COVID-19 on patients living with HIV. She is co-editor of the textbook Global Health Nursing in the 21st Century. She has taken students on short-term immersion experiences to Guatemala, South Africa, and the Dominican Republic to study the delivery of compassionate nursing care in places challenged to provide healthcare resources.
Todd Olszewski, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of Health Sciences
Dr. Todd Olszewski has been a faculty member at Providence College since 2011 and currently serves as chair for the Department of Health Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University with a concentration in the history of science and medicine. He was previously a DeWitt Stetten, Jr., Fellow in the History of Biomedical Sciences and Technology at the National Institutes of Health before arriving at PC. From 2018 to 2023, Dr. Olszewski served as associate director for the Center for Teaching Excellence at Providence College.
As a historian of the biomedical sciences and health policy, he examines how basic and clinical research discoveries have informed patient care, impacted health outcomes, and shaped public perceptions of health care. He was the recipient of the Stanley Jackson Prize for 2017, awarded to the best article to appear in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences in the previous three years. More recently, he has examined the history of current health care and science policy debates, particularly political partisanship as it pertains to health reform efforts. In 2021, he published Today’s Health Care Issues: Democrats and Republicans, a book he co-authored with department colleague Robert Hackey and a dozen HPM student collaborators.
