Prof Emerita Mathy Mezey Named AAN Living Legend

NYU Meyers Prof. Emerita and Senior Research Scientist Mathy Mezey, whose teaching, research and leadership transformed geriatric nursing, has been named a 2024 Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing, one of the highest honors in the profession.

Mezey, founding director of the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing (HIGN) at Meyers, will be celebrated with four other honorees at a special ceremony during the AAN annual Health Policy Conference in October. She’s among more than a dozen NYU Meyers alumni or faculty who have been recognized as Living Legends.

“I’m delighted to celebrate these legendy nurses who have transformed the profession’s impact…” said Academy President Linda D. Scott. “The commitment and passion towards advancing health equity demonstrated throughout their careers is truly outstanding.”

Over a four-decade career, Mezey started two geriatric nurse practitioner programs (at NYU Meyers and the University of Pennsylvania) and was a driving force behind creating national curriculum standards for geriatric nursing that were incorporated into virtually all BSN programs in the United States. She also launched and directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Teaching Nursing Home program that partnered nursing schools and nursing homes to improve resident care and clinical education for students.

“Mathy Mezey is a pioneer. She was among the first to recognize that older adults need a different kind of nursing care and then set about making that happen in a sustainable way - as a clinician, an educator, and a researcher,” said Meyers Dean Angela F. Amar. “Her work has influenced thousands of students, faculty and staff nurses who use their skills and voices to improve the care of older adults."

Mezey’s first experience with nursing came during her early childhood in England, where her mother worked in a hospital lab. “I had a lot of exposure to the nurses,” she said, “with their fabulous blue capes with the red on the inside.”

The memory took root, her path set. Years later, after she moved to the United States with her family and it was time for college, she went to Bates College in Maine to study nursing. As a young nurse working for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York in the 1960s, she was drawn to older patients. 

“I always gravitated to them,” she said. “I liked hearing their life stories,” she said. “I like talking with them. They were quite vulnerable, and their care was complex.” 

For her, they represented what she liked best about nursing: solving challenging problems that required skill, knowledge and compassion. “You had to have sympathy and empathy, but you also had to know the science,” she said. “I was drawn to that combination.”

Mezey had her first teaching job at Lehman College in the Bronx, which was run by Meyers alumna Claire Fagin. Fagin, also an AAN Living Legend, also was director of the Meyers graduate program in psychiatric nursing, and later, nursing dean and the first woman president of University of Pennsylvania.

At Lehman, Mezey integrated geriatric content into the curriculum at Lehman, a pattern she would repeat and expand on throughout her distinguished career, which took her to Penn (recruited by Fagin) and, in 1991, to NYU Meyers, as the Independence Foundation Professor of Nursing Education.

In 1996, she became the founding director of HIGN, which was created with a grant from The John A. Hartford Foundation. She built HIGN into a global leader in research, practice and policy to advance age-friendly healthcare, and NYU Meyers into a forerunner in geriatric nursing education. 

HIGN expanded its reach into hospitals and healthcare delivery organizations with the creation of Nurses Improving Care for Health Systems Elders (NICHE), which is now independent. In 2022, NICHE was named an AAN Edge Runner, a designation that honors evidence-based, nurse-designed innovative models of care.

Meyers Prof. Ab Brody was a freshman biology major at NYU with plans to become a doctor when he got a work study job at HIGN. Then he met Mezey. Now, he’s the associate director of the Institute and holds the Mathy Mezey Chair in Geriatric Nursing, which was endowed at Meyers in 2004.

“Mathy’s wisdom, energy and vision changed my entire life course, from seeking to become a pediatric oncologist to a geriatric nurse and nurse scientist focused on palliative and end-of-life care,” Brody said. “She introduced me to nursing and how nurse scientists and leaders can make massive changes to improve the care of seriously ill older adults.”

Mezey was a pioneer in other ways, too. She navigated a high-powered career and family life, raising four daughters with her pediatrician husband during a time when societal norms had not yet changed enough to readily embrace women in leadership roles.

“I was one of the very few mothers here in our Westchester suburb who worked,” she said. “I had a supportive husband and I was really, really lucky to meet really smart people early who encouraged me.

Reflecting on her work, Mezey said: “I’m especially proud that we were able to create a generation of geriatric nurse faculty around the country. It’s still a very very tentative field. You have to keep watering it all the time.”

“I always wanted to be a nurse and this is a real culmination of a career,” she said of the Living Legend recognition. “I had a wonderful career without it, but this is very, very special.”