2020 Katharine A. Lembright Award Lecturer – Sabina M. De Geest, PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN, FESC, FEANS, FRCN

Sabina De Geest is a Professor of Nursing, Director of the Institute of Nursing Science (INS) and Chair of the Department of Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is also a part-time Professor of Nursing at the Academic Center for Nursing and Midwifery of the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at KU Leuven, Belgium. She holds adjunct appointments in the US at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University, and in Australia at the University of Technology Sydney.

Dr. De Geest leads the international interdisciplinary Leuven Basel Research Group, focusing on improving outcomes in chronically ill and older multimorbid patient populations. Her seminal work on medication adherence sharpened methodological approaches to defining and measuring adherence, multilevel risk factors, clinical and economic consequences, and interventional approaches to reducing non-adherence. Her reporting guideline for medication adherence research (EMERGE) has helped systematize academic writing on this topic. Driven largely by implementation science methodology, her research currently focuses on developing innovative eHealth-powered care models. Across Europe, Australia and the Americas, she has coordinated major research projects addressing psychosocial and behavioral pathways and their relations to chronic illness outcomes, as well as the development and testing of instruments to standardize patient-reported outcome assessment and reporting. And in Switzerland, as a co-investigator of the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STCS), a nation-wide cohort study started in May 2008, she heads the STCS Psychosocial Interest Group.