Stephanie Ferguson
Stephanie Linda Ferguson is an American nurse and a leader in global health. She is the Director of the Harvard Global Nursing Leadership Program and a Professor of the Practice of Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Nursing.
Ferguson grew up with allergic asthma and spent much time with the school nurse at Appomattox Elementary School. She studied nursing at Virginia Commonwealth University. After graduating, she worked at VCU Medical Center on a newborn sickle cell disease screening program, a condition more common among African American babies in Virginia. Her work helped support state-mandated newborn screening, which became law in 1989. Her doctoral research, completed in 1996, looked at how peer counseling could help prevent teen pregnancy in African American girls.
In 1996 she was chosen as a White House Fellow, working with President Bill Clinton and Secretary Donna Shalala. In 2009 she became a professor at the University of Lynchburg and led the Community Nursing Organization, creating nurse-practitioner–led health centers across Richmond. She was elected to the National Committee on Global Health in 2016. In 2022 she joined Harvard as Professor of the Practice of Health Policy and helped launch the Harvard Global Nursing Leadership Program’s Certificate in Global Public Health for Nurse Leaders. The program began in 2022 and partners with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to strengthen nursing leadership worldwide, drawing on nurses’ experience in pandemic response and their role in shaping health policy.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:31 (CET).