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My name is Heather Leutwyler, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, CNS, FGSA (she/her/hers).  I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiological Nursing and an Associate Director for the UCSF Hartford Center of Gerontological Nursing Excellence. In June 2000, I received a Bachelors-of-Science in Neuroscience, a program that provided a strong foundation for understanding the neurobiology of mental illness. This training underpinned my choice of specialty practice as a registered nurse and board-certified family nurse practitioner. I have now worked for over 15 years caring for and doing research with people that have a serious mental illness (SMI), primarily in mental health facilities, including a 90-bed locked residential facility and a transitional residential facility. My experience working with this population underpinned the focus of my doctoral dissertation - the poor physical health of older adults with schizophrenia. After obtaining my PhD in Nursing at UCSF in 2009, I joined the faculty of the School of Nursing at UCSF. Over the past decade, I have received numerous grants including extramural funding with a K23 from the NIA and a High Impact Pilot award from the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP). I am currently the clinical mentor on the grant funded Street Nursing Project (funded by Cigna Foundation for a 1-year period). I am also currently conducting a pilot 2-arm RCT to examine the feasibility and potential efficacy of a game-based group physical activity intervention for smoking cessation in adults with serious mental illness (funded by TRDRP). One of my career goals is to determining the factors associated with poor physical health in older adults living with a with serious mental illness and the development and testing of interventions that will improve the physical health of these individuals.

Find out more about Dr. Leutwyler's work here:  https://profiles.ucsf.edu/heather.leutwyler