Faculty Highlights

Constance Smith Hendricks, PhD, RN

Constance Hendricks is an expert in adolescent health and community-based nursing interventions designed for vulnerable populations to reduce disparities among rural and minority populations. She is gifted with the ability to ignite the can-do attitude in students and new faculty members that she mentors. Many times when someone mentions an idea her words are "do it." She has taken on difficult topics such as adolescent suicide and made high-level contributions to chronic illness research. She has been recognized by the United Nations for her services with Zeta Helping Other People Excel, also known as the Z-HOPE program. Dr. Hendricks wrote a two-volume training manual that has been used by more than two million people in the U.S. and also guided the construction of fifty-three water wells in Ghana, West Africa. Her ability put into funding sources, varying from the NIH and the Rural Alabama Black Church Project, expresses the quality of her work and her passion to help the underserved and vulnerable. Receiving more than $4,100,000.00 for diversity projects and research, she has shown the outstanding goal that any project can reach. From some of her studies, she has developed the Adolescent Health Promotion, Lifestyle Profile, Adolescent Hope Scale, the Refusal and Resistant Skills Questionnaire, and The Hendricks Perceptual Determinants Model, all used by researchers in the nursing and social science fields. As a graduate chair of nursing at Southern University-Baton Rouge, she was granted the nation's second PhD in the nursing program at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She is the first African American to be elected vice president of the Alabama State Nurses Association and has been inducted into the American Academy of Nursing. Auburn University School of Nursing is honored to have Dr. Hendricks on the faculty, not only as an outstanding professor, but also as a positive role model, mentor and leader which any nurse or future nurse can follow.