Northeastern’s Amanda Choflet was honored with the 2025 American Nurses Association Massachusetts Excellence in Nursing Education Award.
In high school, Amanda Choflet was voted “most likely to cure cancer,” even though she hadn’t yet decided what she wanted to do with her life.
Her early exposure to cancer and nursing care came when her 3-year-old cousin was diagnosed with a kidney tumor. Choflet, who was 6 at the time, wasn’t allowed to visit her cousin in the intensive care unit. Instead, she sat in the waiting room, recording messages and songs for her cousin on a small tape deck, watching medical staff go about their work.
“Since then I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the health system and with the things that nurses and doctors, and the whole health care team could do to make other people feel physically and mentally better and help them heal from life-altering illnesses,” says Choflet, now dean of the School of Nursing at Northeastern University and assistant dean of its graduate programs.
Recently, Choflet was selected for the 2025 American Nurses Association Massachusetts Excellence in Nursing Education Award.
Her Northeastern colleagues, who nominated her, described her as an innovative leader dedicated to nursing education and a role model for the qualities this award recognizes.
“Amanda embodies the highest standards of leadership and teaching, making a profound impact on students, colleagues, faculty and the broader Northeastern community,” says Janet Monagle, assistant dean of pre-licensure nursing. “She consistently fosters a supportive and inspiring learning environment and approaches every interaction with empathy, ensuring that students and colleagues feel heard, valued and respected.”
“The most meaningful thing about this award is that I was nominated by my colleagues and it’s incredibly humbling,” Choflet says.
She believes meaningful change in U.S. health care depends on collaboration between academic institutions and health care agencies.
“We need to produce a generation of health care leaders who have the training and the support that they need to really think about health care delivery in a radically new way,” Choflet says. “We have a huge opportunity to work with our students to challenge some of our fundamental assumptions about how health care needs to be delivered, how we engage with community partners, and how we think about patient care itself.”
After high school, Choflet spent a few years canvassing neighborhoods in Denver for a rape crisis center. Realizing she wanted a tangible skill to help others, she pursued an associate’s degree in applied science at a community college.
“Nursing is a proactively human-centered way of interacting with the world,” she says.
During her final year in nursing school, she worked night shifts in an oncology unit that hired her full time after graduation.
While she loved bedside nursing, she says, Choflet always sought growth. After taking various classes and earning a master’s degree in health, leadership and education, she saw many more opportunities to make health care better by moving into project management and leadership roles.
Her clinical career included positions such as director of radiation oncology, interim administrative officer for radiation oncology and interim director of oncology nursing at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
In 2012, she started doing global health nursing work, joining the board of Nursing Heart Inc., an organization running a community health worker program and several community based clinics in Guatemala.
At Johns Hopkins, Choflet also participated in international quality reviews, contributing to health care improvement projects in such countries as Greece, Peru, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
One such project in Greece, for example, led to the Greek government investing millions of dollars in improving access to radiation oncology services across the country.
“It was a very meaningful engagement because we met people who didn’t have services, we filed our report, and within a year they had services,” she says. “It felt so good.”
Driven by a desire to transform U.S. health care, Choflet decided to transition to academia in 2019.
“I think that education, for me at least, is how I’d like to do that,” she says.
Choflet joined Northeastern’s School of Nursing in July 2022 as assistant dean for graduate programs. Within a year, she became interim dean and later permanent dean of the School of Nursing.
In addition to her leadership roles, Choflet conducts research on substance use and suicide among nurses, physicians and pharmacists.
She credits the work that has been done at the School of Nursing over the last three years to her whole team.
“The best team I’ve ever been a part of,” Choflet says. “I wish that my nominators were receiving this award with me.”