Dr. Teri Pipe Brings Mindfulness Talk on Stress and Wellbeing to ASU Retirees

Teri Pipe, Ph.D., RN, the founding director of ASU's Center for Mindfulness, Compassion and Resilience, led a two-hour online seminar titled "The Power of Mindfulness" for the ASU Retirees Association on March 12, drawing 40 registered participants to the Zoom session.

The seminar, hosted by the ASU Retirees Association (ASURA) and open to members of affiliated university retirees associations including NAURA, the NAU Retirees Association, ran from 10:00 AM to noon. Registration had closed ahead of the event, with 40 participants confirmed and 60 spaces still listed as available at the time the listing was captured.

The session was framed around practical application: "This seminar is designed to enhance your understanding of the benefits of mindfulness and to share simple steps to start or expand your mindfulness practice," according to the event description, which also posed the question, "Did you know mindfulness can help you maintain your center, manage stress, strengthen focus, calm the mind and more?"

Pipe brought considerable institutional depth to the subject. She served as a tenured professor at ASU from 2001 to 2023, as Dean of the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation from 2011 to 2018, and as ASU's university-wide Chief Well-Being Officer from 2017 to 2021. She is now the Richard E. Sinaiko Professor in Health Care Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing and core faculty in the UW-Madison Center for Healthy Minds, while retaining the title of Dean Emerita at ASU's Edson College.

Before her ASU tenure, Pipe served as Director of Nursing Research and Innovation at Mayo Clinic Arizona, where she was also an associate professor of nursing at Mayo Clinic's College of Medicine. She was selected in 2014 as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Executive Nurse Fellow and holds the designation of Distinguished Fellow in the National Academies of Practice.

Her doctoral work centered on health policy and administration with a minor in gerontology, completed at Pennsylvania State University. She also holds a master's degree in nursing with a gerontology emphasis from the University of Arizona and a bachelor's in nursing from the University of Iowa. Her research spans well-being in professional and clinical populations, preventive and protective well-being strategies, aging, resilience, health promotion, and positive coping and stress management.

Pipe has described mindfulness as "a skill set to increase the ability to experience being fully present, focused and alive," and her speaking record reflects that framing: she is a sought-after presenter on clinician workforce wellness, self-compassion, and workforce resilience, including a session for the American Organization for Nursing Leadership in which host Bill Klaproth introduced her work on self-compassion by noting that "learning how to give self-compassion can help us be more compassionate with others."

The March 12 ASURA seminar extended that thread directly into a retiree community she helped shape through more than two decades at ASU, offering tools rooted in the same research agenda that drove the founding of the university's dedicated mindfulness center.