Dr. Cheedy Jaja is an associate professor in the College of Nursing at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and a board-certified Psychiatric and Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. His eclectic education includes graduate degrees in public administration and policy, public health genetics, philosophy, political science, and clinical and translational science. He was the inaugural Pharmacogenetics, Ethics, and Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Indiana University School of Medicine. His research interests are sickle cell disease pain, analgesic, and psychopharmacogenetics. He has over 14 years of experience providing clinical and psychosocial care primarily to sickle cell disease patients in ambulatory healthcare settings locally and internationally.

Dr. Jaja is actively involved in global health. During the Ebola virus disease epidemic in 2014-2015, he served two tours of duty in Sierra Leone with the Boston-based humanitarian organization, Partners in Health. More recently, in the West African nation of Sierra Leone, he was instrumental in establishing a pediatric sickle cell disease clinic.

Currently, Dr. Jaja holds leadership positions in organizations including the International Association of Sickle Cell Nurses and Physician Assistants and the Network of Minority Research Investigators and has received a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship award from the U.S. State Department, among other honors. In 2020, he was inducted into the American Academy of Nursing.

Learning Objective: As a result of participating in this activity, the learner will be able to review and critically appraise evidence-based teaching strategies and to discuss implications of these strategies for clinical practice, classroom teaching, and online teaching.

Target Audience: APRNs and Registered Nurses who are not APRNs; Physicians and/or PAs.

Competencies to be addressed: Patient Care and Procedural Skills; Systems-based Practice; Medical Knowledge; Interpersonal and Communication Skills; Professionalism

Fees: There are no fees and no prerequisites for this activity.

To receive credit, participants MUST sign in for each session they attend. Those participants who DO NOT sign in will NOT receive credit for the session.

For comments or concerns regarding credit, contact CPDRSS@usf.edu. For all other concerns, contact  confacdev@usf.edu.