Meg Kotani

Meg Kotani, MSN, RN, PHN, is a doctoral student in the Florence S. Downs PhD Program in Nursing Research and Theory Development at the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Her program of research focuses on addressing the sociocultural and structural factors that contribute to health inequities among racial and ethnic minority populations, particularly immigrants, and on building a sustainable nursing workforce to improve their health outcomes. She is a Sasakawa Nursing Fellow at the Sasakawa Health Foundation.

Prior to beginning her PhD at NYU Meyers, Kotani worked as a clinical nurse in a cardiovascular internal medicine and surgical unit, where she contributed to improving work environments that support nurses, particularly in discharge care planning and enhancing care for immigrant patients. After recognizing critical gaps in research on immigrant health and understanding that both the inequities affecting immigrants and the challenges nurses face in their care stem from deeper structural issues within the healthcare system, she pursued graduate studies to generate research that could inform practice, education, and policy reform.

During her master’s program, she worked on several research projects, including a secondary analysis of visiting nurses in Japan that used mediation analysis to examine the association between managerial empowering behavior and staff nurses’ care performance. Alongside her studies, she continued clinical practice at short-stay and adult day care centers while teaching nursing students in clinical practice, gerontology, and undergraduate research courses. In addition, she worked part-time at a publishing company, where she researched trends in nursing education and assisted with reviewing and editing educational materials. She is also a member of the Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA) International Medical Information Center, an NGO that promotes inclusive community healthcare by providing multilingual medical information and free interpretation services for foreign residents, travelers, and healthcare professionals.