Associate Professor

Dr. Jennifer Averill has been involved in researching rural health issues for over 20 years, bringing to the forefront such issues as the unique consideration of health care access challenges older adults face, community partnership models for describing, analyzing, and addressing community level health disparities for older adults; and transcultural considerations for older adults living in remote regions near the international border.

Her early nursing career was clinically based in critical care, cardiac care, oncology, public and home health, migrant health, school health and hospice. She was previously a clinical nursing instructor in community, migrant and institutional settings (since the mid 1980’s in NM and CO). She joined the tenure track faculty of UNM as an Assistant Professor in 2000. She received her BSN and MSN in Nursing from the University of New Mexico in 1985 and 1988, respectively. She received her PhD in Nursing from the University of Colorado in 1997, with emphasis on ethnographic methods in a remote rural community, studying the health care experiences of retired migrant farm workers. She is now a senior fellow on the NM CARES Health Disparities grant in the School of Medicine.