Dr. Karen Devereaux Melillo is Professor and Chair, Department of Nursing, and formerly Coordinator of the Gerontological Nurse Practitioner Specialty. This specialty was named to the top tier of graduate nursing programs by U.S. News and World Report. She earned her PhD from Brandeis University in 1990, where her studies focused on aging, long-term care and health policy. She received her Master of Science Degree in Gerontological Nursing from the University of Lowell in 1978, which prepared her as a Gerontological Nurse Practitioner; in 1998, she was awarded the Francis Cabot Lowell Outstanding Alumni Award for the College of Health Professions at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She was also selected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and for the Distinguished Alumni Award from Massachusetts Bay Community College, both in 2001. 

Since coming to the University in 1982, she has established an active research program on the utilization of Nurse Practitioners in institutional long-term care, for which she received the American College of Health Care Administrators Long-Term Care Research Award.  Her research interests also include physical fitness and exercise activity of older adults, and older Latinos in particular, as well as the application of a wandering technology device for older adults with Alzheimer's disease. She is a Co-Investigator on a 5-year, $3.5M National Institutes of Health, NIOSH-funded study on "Health Disparities Among Healthcare Workers," where she leads the long-term qualitative case study team in two nursing homes.  Dr. Melillo has over 50 peer-reviewed publications, and is a Editorial Review Board member for the Journal of Gerontological Nursing and a manuscript reviewer for a number of peer-reviewed national journals, including Geriatric Nursing and Clinical Excellence for Nurse Practitioners. In 2005, she, along with Dr. Susan Crocker Houde, published the book, "Geropsychiatric and Mental Health Nursing."  

She is active in a number of national professional associations (American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties, Gerontological Society of America) and local Boards, including the Advisory Board to the Eastern Massachusetts Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association (Lowell satellite office) and the Board of Trustees for D'Youville Senior Care, Inc., Lowell, MA.  She is Past-President of the Eta Omega Chapter, Sigma Theta Tau International, the Honor Society of Nursing.