Linda Sarna, RN, PhD, FAAN

Dr. Linda Sarna, Dean, Professor and Lulu Wolf Hassenplug Endowed Chair at the UCLA School of Nursing received her doctorate from the University of California, San Francisco, and her baccalaureate and master's degress from UCLA. She is recognized for her scholarship promoting nursing involvement in tobacco control and in oncology nursing research focused on quality of life and symptoms of patients with lung cancer. In collaboration with Dr. Stella Bialous, Dr. Sarna has led research efforts to increase nursing interventions to help smokers quit using web-based educational programs and resources in the US, currently working with nurses in Kentucky and Louisiana. She is testing these methods in studies involving nurses in China, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Drs. Sarna and Bialous initiated the Tobacco Free Nurses initiative to help nurses quit smoking and to increase nursing education, research, and leadership in tobacco control.

She has received numerous honors for her work, including recognition from the Oncology Nursing Society as a Distinguished Research Professor and the International Society of Nurses in Cancer Care with a Distinguished Service Award. She has collaborated with national and international nursing organizations on policies related to tobacco control, and with the National Cancer Institute on a research agenda regarding tobacco and cancer. Drs. Sarna and Bialous have monitored smoking among nurses in the U.S. as well as the changes in tobacco use among nurses using data from the Nurses’ Health Study. She and Dr. Bialous co-edited the 2009 Annual Review of Nursing Research focused on nursing scholarship in tobacco control. She recently co-authored a monograph for the World Health Organization on the role that nurses can play in reducing non-communicable diseases. Dr Sarna is the Chair of the UCLA Tobacco-Free Policy Steering committee.  Dean Sarna wass appointed as the first National Board Chair for the National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) in 2016. 

Professor Sarna, was appointed Dean of the School of Nursing on November 7, 2016.