Prof. Barbara J. Holtzclaw University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, USA

Dr. Barbara J. Holtzclaw is a nurse scientist with nearly twenty years of clinical practice and 30 years of teaching and research. She holds a nursing diploma (San Diego County Hospital), a BS in Nursing (University of Oklahoma), MS in Nursing, with physiology major (U. Calif. San Francisco), PhD in... read morehigher education (University of Oklahoma), and Post-Doctoral training in Clinical Research (U. of Pennsylvania). She uses basic science concepts to inform clinical interventions. As nursing educator (Vanderbilt University, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, and University of Oklahoma Health science Center), she stimulated students and junior faculty to seek underlying causes of clinical symptoms. She measured metabolic cost of shivering in post-anesthesia hypothermic cardiac surgery patients. By correlating oxygen consumption with stages of shivering, she demonstrated the need to prevent the metabolic toll of violent shaking by rewarming or medications. Two federally funded research studies showed nursing interventions could prevent febrile shivering in persons with cancer and HIV. She has over 50 publications about fever, shivering, and hypothermia.