Cynthia Donaldson Steele, RN, BSN, MPH

Cynthia Donaldson Steele, RN, BSN, MPH, died May 30, 2015 at her home in Severna Park, MD, USA. During her career at Johns Hopkins, Cindy was an assistant professor of psychiatry, a faculty associate at JHU’s School of Nursing, co-director of JHU’s neuropsychiatry clinic, and a senior faculty member at the Copper Ridge Institute. With her passing, the Alzheimer’s disease research and clinical care arenas lost a pioneering presence. The direction of her work and her numerous contributions stemmed from her spirituality and her steadfast commitment to the maintenance of dignity for all. She believed, and her work evidenced, that even the most severely and terminally impaired patients were deserving of dignified care and research to improve that care. She also believed in the dignity and worth of front-line caregivers in longterm care, the nursing assistants, a group that had often been ignored and occasionally disparaged. She believed that they deserved education to enable them to improve care and, thus, be safe and have pride in their work. Cindy got “into the trenches,” even into the showers with patients, to work with nursing assistants, to understand their challenges, and to help them learn better methods of care provision for the sickest and most vulnerable older patients. I met Cindy Steele in 1981 when she was a nursing student. During her psychiatry rotation at Johns Hopkins, Cindy was supervised by Jane Lucas Blaustein, RN, whose career focused on the psychiatric complications of medical disorders. Jane then introduced Cindy to our recently established research clinics in Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer disease. Cindy immediately grasped the possibilities for nursing care and its perspective in this environment. From the start, her intelligence, energy, and optimism were obvious. She was one of the first to see how psychiatric nursing principles could improve care of patients with a variety of cognitive disorders, even those with severe impairment. In addition, she appreciated the need for nursing research in this area. By the time the NIH Center for Nursing Research was