Following her lifelong dreams

From an early age, School of Nursing Dean Afaf Meleis learned that there is "no such thing as a no."

When she applied to an undergraduate nursing program in her native Alexandria, Egypt, she was rejected because the minimum age requirement was 16, and she was 15 years old at the time.

Undeterred, Meleis turned to the university chancellor, who helped her circumvent the system.

She reapplied, this time calculating her age in Arabian months. Meleis got in.

In pursuing nursing, she followed in the footsteps of her mother, who left her family in Alexandria for two years in the 1950s to pursue a bachelor's degree in nursing.

At 19, Meleis won a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation at the University of California at Los Angeles to study nursing as part of a World Health Organization initiative.

She worked to bring her fiance -- who was studying nuclear engineering in Egypt -- to Los Angeles, and, ever since then, she has lived in the United States, bringing an international perspective to her work.

Meleis has focused specifically on health issues for impoverished women. Despite living in the U.S., she has traveled throughout the world -- through Asia, Scandinavia, South America and the Middle East -- to further her research and lobby to institute health policies that could help disadvantaged women.

And in 2002, she made it to Penn.

Meleis says she felt "an immediate sense of a match between [her] strategic goals and where the University was going."

She said she prefers teaching and research, which she did for most of her career, to her current administrative post. But as dean at Penn, she can devote her energy to the advancement of nursing as a profession.

"Medical science will save people," she said. "But nursing science will help people cope with their conditions and with the environment and live in a healthier way with a sense of well being."

To help equip her own nursing students with the skills to do that, she is working to establish a new research center in the School of Nursing, a mentorship program to cultivate rising stars among the Nursing faculty and an honors program to do the same for up to eight students.

But Meleis also has personal goals for the new year. She plans to maintain her exercise program and find time, even between meetings, for things she loves, like theater-going, hiking and reading.

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