Claire Fagin

Claire Muriel Fagin (; November 25, 1926 – January 16, 2024) was an American nurse, educator, and academic. She was an early advocate of family-centered care, with major contributions to psychiatric nursing, nursing education and geriatric nursing. Fagin was also one of the first women to serve as president of an Ivy League university.

Biography Born in Manhattan on November 25, 1926, Fagin was the younger of two daughters of Mae and Harry Mintzer, immigrants to New York City from Poland and Russia. She elected to study nursing for a bachelor's degree in science at Wagner College, earning her nursing degree in 1948, and then earned a master's degree in psychiatric nursing from Columbia University and a doctorate at New York University. Her doctoral dissertation covered the concept of "rooming in" for parents of hospitalized children. She continued her research in this area, which influenced the perception of parental visitation in hospitals and led to rule changes allowing 24-hour visits in pediatric wings.

By the time Fagin earned her nursing degree, she was working at Seaview Hospital, where she cared for children with tuberculosis, developing a lifelong interest in the psychiatric problems of children and psychiatric nursing in general. After working at Seaview Hospital, she worked in the adolescent psychiatry unit at Bellevue Hospital. When the National Institute of Mental Health established a clinical research facility in 1953, she became its first director of children's programs at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Fagin was the director of the graduate program in psychiatric nursing at New York University from 1965 to 1969. She left in 1977 to join the University of Pennsylvania as dean of the School of Nursing. At Penn, Fagin developed the first nursing doctorate in the Ivy League and a PhD program as well. She also opened the first center for nursing research in the U.S. in 1980. She is credited with leading a transformation in nursing education by advocating that nurses should have a science-based education and graduate with bachelor's degrees. (after Hanna Holborn Gray, who served as acting president of Yale University from 1977 to 1978 Fagin served as president of the National League for Nursing and as an adviser to the World Health Organization.

Fagin was an Honorary Fellow of the UK Royal College of Nursing, was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 2010

Personal life and death She married Samuel L. Fagin, an engineer and mathematician, in 1952 and had two sons. One of her children died of COVID-19 in 2020, and her husband Samuel died in 2019.

Selected works