Prof. Marilyn J. Aten (PhD, RN) was Professor Emerita at the University of Rochester School of Nursing, where she held a joint appointment in the School of Medicine and Dentistry. She came to Rochester's Department of Pediatrics in 1967, left briefly in 1972, and returned in 1975 as assistant professor of nursing and of pediatrics. She retired in 2008 as a Professor in both the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine, having worked for nearly forty years as a maternal-child nurse with a particular focus on families living in poverty[reference:2].
Her clinical training ran through Buffalo and Baltimore before returning to Rochester for doctoral work in a different discipline: a nursing diploma from Millard Fillmore Hospital, a BSN from Rochester, an MS in Maternal and Child Health Nursing from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in Developmental Psychology from Cornell. That combination , bedside nursing plus developmental psychology , is what allowed her to design interventions that were both clinically grounded and theoretically defensible.
In the late 1960s she led the formation of the ,Rochester Adolescent Maternity Program (RAMP), which continues to provide specialised obstetric care for pregnant teenagers, alongside social work, nutrition, financial counselling and group prenatal care[reference:5]. Her research followed the same population. In the late 1990s she was a key investigator on the Rochester AIDS Prevention Program (RAPP), a five-year collaboration with the Rochester City School District and Rochester General Hospital which demonstrated that sex education delivered in a way meaningful to young people , ideally before middle school , can positively change attitudes and behaviour. In 2001 she founded and directed the School of Nursing's Center for High-Risk Children and Youth, a team testing nursing interventions against youth violence, high-risk sexual behaviour, HIV transmission and teen pregnancy.
Her community work was not confined to research projects. In 2005 she led the School of Nursing's response when the Rochester City School District asked for help, benchmarking against other districts, consulting national experts and visiting schools to produce a proposal for improving health services across 74 schools and 37,000 students. Administratively she served as PhD Program Director, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and briefly as Acting Dean in 1993, and she was Director of Research for the local chapter of the HRSA-funded Leadership Education and Adolescent Health programme , the only nurse in the country to hold that distinction. When she retired in 2008 she asked that, in lieu of a gift, the School donate to Sojourner House, a local women's shelter. She died on 30 April 2014.
Prof. Aten's career is a case study in what happens when a researcher refuses to treat 'the community' as a setting and treats it instead as a partner. RAMP began because pregnant teenagers in Rochester needed care that met their developmental reality, and it is still running more than fifty years later. RAPP began because the school district asked for help, and it produced evidence that changed how sex education is timed and delivered. The Center for High-Risk Children and Youth began because she wanted those interventions tested rather than assumed.
Her colleagues remembered two things about her that matter for a manuscript reviewer. The first was standards: Bethel Powers recalled that 'she set a standard for scholarship in her field that, as an educator, she taught and inspired fledgling researchers to emulate'. The second was range , she served as a research methodologist not only for nursing students but for fellows in medicine, nutrition, psychology and social work, which meant she was constantly reading outside her own discipline and judging whether a design actually supported its claim.
That is the faculty APC most needs in health-sciences review: someone who can tell whether a community-based intervention study has the sample, the follow-up and the analytic plan to justify what it concludes. Prof. Aten spent forty years making exactly that judgement, and we are grateful for the standard she set.
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