Gloria Peel Giarratano, MSN, PhD, earned a Masters in Maternal Infant Nursing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1979. After obtaining a doctoral degree in Nursing from Georgia State University in 2000, she completed a fellowship in the Summer Genetics Institute at NIH’s National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). She joined LSU Health Sciences Center in 1984 as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing and became a Professor of Nursing in 2007.