Rachel H. Adler, PhD, APRN, PMHNP-BC, AGNP-C

At UT Health San Antonio, my advanced nursing practice is in outpatient psychiatry within the School of Nursing’s Wellness 360 clinic, which extends into the community (I provide psychiatric care to patients under supervision of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and to veterans at Crosspoint Outpatient Clinic and, starting in 9/2023, will provide psycho-oncological services at Mays Cancer Center), and I teach clinical courses in psychiatric nursing at local psychiatric hospitals. I am especially interested in interventional research aimed at finding culturally appropriate strategies for non-psychiatric health care providers to address the mental health needs of cancer patients, veterans, the formerly incarcerated and other vulnerable populations.  A seasoned ethnographer and expert in anthropologically grounded qualitative methods, my expertise includes medical and urban anthropology, men’s mental health, suicide prevention, psycho-oncology, homelessness and health disparities.  

My entire research agenda, as diverse and broad as it might be in some ways, is laser focused on translational science. There is a story to how this came to be.  A full-time professor of anthropology since 2000, after receiving tenure I came to feel unsatisfied in my academic role because I found it difficult to directly help people with my anthropological scholarship. At the time, I was studying immigrants, most of whom were undocumented. In the post-9/11 world there was a lot of fear and distrust among them, and I wanted to help them in tangible ways with my research. I found that the archaic US immigration system created barriers to immigrants who wanted to legalize their residency status, and as an anthropologist there was no feasible way for me to effect change and help my research subjects. This desire to have more of an impact on the lives of the people whom I study led me to switch gears and become a nurse, because this was a way that I could make an impact, regardless of larger structural factors of which I had little if any control. I completed a BSN during my first sabbatical in 2008, and I practiced inpatient psychiatric nursing as an RN for almost a decade, connecting my nursing practice to my scholarship.  Ultimately desiring to have more clinical autonomy, I completed a Nurse Practitioner degree during a second sabbatical. I have been an advanced practice nurse since 2019, board certified in both Psychiatric Mental Health and Adult Primary Care. I left my tenured full professorship in anthropology at a liberal arts-oriented college to join the faculty of UT Health San Antonio in 2021, for the opportunity to practice and teach nursing as part of my academic role, and to engage in team-based, scientific research in the health sciences--scholarship that directly impacts my patients, (and research subjects) in direct and tangible ways. Hence, my passion for and dedication to translational science.