YWCA Women of Achievement awards: WSU professor Denise Smart has ‘taken on three careers at the same time’

Denise Smart’s work as a registered nurse spans more than four decades, taking her from a remote town in Alaska to serving as a military public health officer. Now a professor at Washington State University who is working on multiple research projects, Smart has been recognized for her dedication to her community with the 2024 YWCA Women of Achievement Science, Technology and Environment award.

Smart’s father’s service in the U.S. Navy meant she was born in a military hospital in Puerto Rico, but she was raised in Florida. Her mother was a nurse, and Smart knew she wanted to be a nurse as well. At the time, it was hard to get into nursing school. She attended the University of Florida for a year and a half before learning there was a two-year wait list to get into the nursing program. She switched to Humboldt State University, but after discovering the wait list there was five years, she transferred to Utah State University.

By the time Smart graduated with a degree in sociology, she had amassed a large number of credits and multiple minors in multiple subjects, including French and Native American studies.

“Every course enriched my ideas of the world,” she said. “Your world really opens up.”

Belatedly, Smart learned she could earn a two-year nursing degree, so she enrolled in Florida Junior College in Jacksonville, Florida. All her credits meant that she was nearly done with the program before she began. “All I had to do was take my clinicals and a microbiology course,” she said.

Her first job in March 1980 was in Tanana, Alaska. At the time it was a remote Native village inaccessible by road with about 450 residents. People had to fly into the town’s small airport or travel via the Yukon River. Smart remembers fondly living next to the village’s hospital on the river.

“It was the best experience,” she said.

She would later relocate to Fairbanks, Alaska, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing and got her teaching credentials from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Her father and brother served in the military, and at one point during the Vietnam War, Smart tried to join the Army. She never lost the desire to serve and after she and her husband had their three children, she joined the Navy Reserves.

“I just felt it was something I could do as a nurse,” she said. “It was a great experience. I had no regrets. I had wonderful experiences.”

However, bureaucracy got in the way. Smart didn’t get paid by the Navy for a year. Her paychecks would arrive in the mail, with her Social Security number listed, but with a man’s name on them. Repeated complaints yielded nothing, so Smart left and joined the Air National Guard.

“They couldn’t fix it,” she said of the payroll error.

Though her background was in labor and delivery and community nursing, the Air National Guard made her a public health nurse.

“It was an easy transition,” Smart said. “Sometimes doors open for you.”

After spending 25 years in Alaska, Smart asked to be transferred to Spokane. At the time she had a son living in the Lilac City and a daughter attending the University of Idaho. In 2005, she began teaching at Washington State University. She has since retired from the 141st Medical Group at Fairchild Air Force Base as a lieutenant colonel.

Smart has been involved in multiple research studies, some funded and some unfunded. She is in various stages of three different studies currently, including studying maternal stress during pregnancy. She’s working with an engineer to create a device that can be used to monitor soldiers for heat injuries and is collaborating with colleagues on a study on safe working conditions for nurses. Smart said she’s been looking at the number of nurses who have left the profession since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Smart said 200,000 nurses quit the profession in 2021, some because of the lack of personal protective equipment and others because of the risk to their health. At the height of the pandemic, nurses were wearing garbage bags instead of proper equipment and were creating impromptu decontamination stations in their garages to avoid bringing COVID home to their families, Smart said.

“They’re still leaving the workforce at the rate of 100,000 a year,” she said. “Most of them have less than two years of service.”

The issue now seems to be that nearly all medical facilities are short staffed, Smart said, and there aren’t enough new nurses starting out to replace them. Nurses are working 12-hour shifts for a week at a time, then being called in to cover shifts on their days off. “They go in and they’re burning out,” she said. “This is nationwide.”

WSU associate professor Marian Wilson nominated Smart for the award, citing her research and her mentoring of others in their own research projects. Smart’s published study on nurses and compassion fatigue has helped researchers around the world launch studies of their own on the topic, Wilson said. Smart is also dedicated to helping students and fellow faculty members publish their research results, she said.

“She is just so dedicated to her profession, her profession as a nurse and as a faculty member,” she said.

Being a professor is demanding, particularly when one is as involved as Smart is with her students, Wilson said. Yet Smart also had her work in the Air National Guard and, for a time, worked part-time at the local corrections center as a nurse.

“That really impressed me,” Wilson said. “She’s taken on three careers at the same time. I feel like she’s very driven to contribute and give back to society.”

Smart said she was surprised and humbled to learn about her award since she doesn’t think she’s doing anything special.

“I don’t think I did anything really to deserve it,” she said. “I’m just living my life. I don’t see myself as exceptional. I see myself as an ordinary person who is just persistent.”