Hastings Center News
2025 Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Nursing Awards Announced
The Hastings Center and The Cunniff-Dixon Foundation are pleased to announce three recipients of the 2025 Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Nursing Awards, which honor nurses who demonstrate extraordinary compassion and skill in caring for patients nearing the end of life.
The Cunniff-Dixon Foundation, whose mission is to enrich the provider-patient relationship near the end of life through education, collaboration, and recognition, created and funded the awards, which are $25,000 each. The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute that has done groundbreaking work on end-of-life decision-making, cosponsors the awards.
The 2025 recipients are:
Erin Collins, Cofounder and Director of Programs, The Peaceful Presence Project in Bend, Oregon. Collins is a certified hospice and palliative care nurse with 17 years of experience in hospice and adult and pediatric oncology. Trained as an end-of-life doula, she is a member of the board of directors for the Oregon Hospice and Palliative Care Association, an appointed member to the Oregon Health Authority’s Palliative Care and Quality of Life Advisory Council, and the former vice-chair of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s End-of-Life Doula Advisory Council. She cofounded The Peaceful Presence Project after seeing that many patients came to hospice afraid of death and unprepared for it. She is committed to educating the community at all levels, including individuals, families, students, and clinicians, in preparing for and talking about serious and terminal illness with compassion and tenderness. She empowers families to be present with their loved ones in the final stage of life, however long that may be, and believes that by talking about and planning for death with our loved ones, we can ease much of the suffering that arises at the end of life.
Melinda “Mel” Mayorga, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Ambulatory Oncology Services, University of Southern California Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Board-certified as an adult gerontology clinical nurse specialist and an oncology nurse, she chairs the Ambulatory Fall Prevention Council for Norris and Keck ambulatory clinics and co-chairs the Keck Nursing Professionalism program. In 2022, she was named the USC Nurse Humanitarian of the Year. Mayorga is a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Nurse Honor Guard, where she honors deceased nurses. In 2024, she was a recipient of the Simms/Mann Family Foundation’s Off the Chart award to recognize and reward greatness in nursing in the Los Angeles area. She was commended for her holistic approach to palliative care, grounded in evidence-based practice and interprofessional collaborations. She created the Sacred Pause Initiative, a grief support for clinicians and staff, and By Your Side, a hospital vigil program, and has lectured on her work involving “last responders.”
Jackie Palmore, Clinical Coordinator for the UAB Center for Palliative and Supportive Care at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical Center. A registered nurse for 38 years, she has devoted most of her career to palliative, supportive, and hospice home care. She played a pivotal role in the development of UAB’s 12-bed inpatient Palliative and Comfort Care Unit in 2004 and has since helped establish the inpatient consult service and the broader palliative care interdisciplinary team. In addition, as a faculty member of the Palliative Care Leadership Center at the UAB Center to Advance Palliative Care, she has helped train more than 50 hospice and palliative care teams nationwide. In 2001, she spearheaded the creation of the first hospice program in the Alabama Department of Corrections. She was the first nurse at UAB to earn national certification in palliative nursing and recently completed UAB’s Pain and Addiction Scholars program.
The awards selection committee is comprised of Dr. Betty Ferrell, director of nursing research and education and a professor at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif. (chair); Dr. Ashley Leak Bryant, associate professor of nursing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Dr. Lynn F. Reinke, endowed professor in palliative care at the University of Utah; Dr. Billy Rosa, chief research fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York; and Dr. Tamryn Gray Fowler, assistant professor at the UNC School of Nursing
Photo: From left: Erin Collins, Melinda Mayorga, Jackie Palmore
