AACN Board
July 2022-June 2025
Nicole Fontenot, DNP, APRN, ACNP-BC, CCNS, CCRN, serves a three-year term as a director on the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) board of directors from July 1, 2022, through June 30, 2025. She held a one-year term as treasurer from July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024.
Throughout her nursing career, as a trauma critical care nurse and later as an advanced practice nurse, she has been passionate about nursing science. As manager of nursing science and academic outreach at Houston Methodist Academic Institute, she is leading a team of nurse scientists and nurse educators who guide and mentor nurses throughout their own nursing science journeys.
Fontenot’s experience as a critical care nurse has shaped most of her nursing science work. In her previous clinical roles, she often served on rapid response teams for emergencies in non-critical care environments, which led to focusing her research on nurses’ role in preventing clinical deterioration. She led a hospital-wide initiative to better prepare nurses to detect clinical deterioration and take early action. After that initiative, she led a research study showing that with training, nurses significantly decreased the time between the first sign of deterioration and activation of the rapid response team. Subsequently, unplanned ICU admissions and mortality both decreased. This initiative was published in Nursing Forum and in American Journal of Critical Care.
Her volunteer activity with AACN includes chair of the API Program Planning Committee (2020-2022), a member of the ACCNS Practice Analysis Task Force (2021), a research grant reviewer (2020) and an initial reviewer for the Beacon Award (2015-2019). Additional affiliations include membership in Sigma Theta Tau, Society of Critical Care Medicine and the American Nurses Association.
Fontenot earned a Doctor of Nursing Practice and a Master of Science, both from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Northwest University, Kirkland, Washington.
In her free time, Fontenot loves to travel. She has been to 17 countries and 46 U.S. states, and hopes to visit the last four states in the next couple of years.