Kelly Buettner-Schmidt graduated from the RWJF Nursing and Health Policy Collaborative Fellowship in 2013. Honored by her colleagues, Kelly was the recipient of the 2005 Lillian Wald Service Award from the American Public Health Association’s Public Health Nursing Section for her contributions in the field of tobacco prevention and control, including many public health policy accomplishments in North Dakota. A local public health nurse for 18 years and currently Associate Professor of Nursing at North Dakota State University, Kelly began teaching in 2000, serving as nursing department chair for four years at Minot State University (MSU). Having been awarded numerous grants for tobacco control policy, she has served as a consultant for various entities and currently is the Executive Director of Healthy Communities International at NDSU.
As a consultant, Kelly has motivated and guided organizations, coalitions, and communities, resulting in successful passage of policies leading to smoke-free workplaces and public places in North Dakota. She has conducted several evaluations of both local and state smoke-free laws, including economic impact and compliance studies, and she is currently conducting a third tobacco smoke pollution study.
A few of her previous successes include assisting in the successful North Dakota-initiated measure to require that tobacco settlement dollars be allocated to tobacco prevention; leading her undergraduate public health nursing students in a year-long project to change MSU to a tobacco-free campus; and leading efforts to make Minot the first North Dakota community with a smoke-free restaurant ordinance. Kelly has published several articles and co-authored “Taking Action: The Nightingales Take on Big Tobacco,”a chapter in Policy and Politics in Nursing and Health Care (7th ed., in press) by Mason, Hopkins Outlaw, Gardner, and O’Grady. She was first author of “Social Justice: A Concept Analysis (Buettner-Schmidt, K., & Lobo, M.L. (2012). Social justice: a concept analysis. Journal of Advanced Nursing 68(4), 948–958. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2648.2011.05856.x )
Kelly received her BSN and MSN degrees from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Her research interests include the areas of public health policy, public health nursing, and tobacco prevention and control policy.
