BROOKINGS – K Reeder, a professor and associate dean of research in the College of Nursing at SDSU, has been honored as a fellow in the American Heart Association.

Reeder, who joined the faculty at South Dakota State University before the start of the school year, has been involved with the American Heart Association for 40 years. She received the honor at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in New Orleans in November 2016. She had previously been at Barnes-Jewish College in St. Louis.

Nominations are reviewed by a blind peer review committee, which chooses 14 individuals to receive the association’s prestigious fellow designation.

While the award recognizes a recipient’s career achievements, Reeder said it comes on the heels of the completion of a $1 million, five-year study on heart failure symptom self-management. It collected data on the symptoms of 90 patients at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City and Barnes-Jewish Hospital, she said.

Reeder hopes to gain grant funding for a follow-up study on how to better support patients with heart failure in self-management of commonly occurring symptoms, such as shortness of breath.

She started teaching basic cardiac life support classes in 1976 while she was working as an intensive care unit nurse. She has continued to do that as well as volunteering as an advanced cardiac life support instructor. In the early 1990s, she transitioned from an ICU nurse into nursing education.

Reeder taught and did research at Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa in Mason City, Iowa; UnityPoint Health in Des Moines, Iowa; and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

While at Kansas University Medical Center School of Nursing, she received the National Institutes of Health grant and spoke at American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in 2014 and 2015. Reeder also serves as a grant reviewer for the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and the American Nurses Foundation and has written sections of a nursing outcomes textbook and the Encyclopedia of Nursing Research in addition to being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

“This fellowship is an honor. It tells me the work you do is highly recognized by your peers and it’s a call for me to keep going forward with this work for everyone who has heart failure and for all of those who live with and unconditionally support loved ones living with heart failure,” Reeder said.