Sharron Docherty, PhD, PNP, RN, FAAN, is an associate professor and Assistant Dean of the PhD program at Duke University School of Nursing. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine and is an associate of the Duke Initiative for Science and Society.

Dr. Docherty’s research focuses on improving health outcomes for children, adolescents, young adults, and families undergoing intensive treatment for life-threatening and chronic conditions. She seeks to improve care models, symptom management, and decision making from diagnosis through the end of life. Using methodological expertise in qualitative and complex data integration in mixed methods, she develops and tests interventions for children, adolescents and young adults using a developmental science framework and a methodological focus on trajectories across time and developmental milestones. A second theme of her research is focused on developing feasible models of palliative care delivery. Current studies include tests of a peer-coaching intervention to address the unique challenges of adolescents and young adults who struggle to deal with disease and manage therapies, and of personalized palliative care delivery to older adults in the ICU using a mobile app.

A core theme across Dr. Docherty's science has been to develop and advance novel research methodologies that capture clinically based, context-dependent evidence that crosses levels of response, and result in intensive, complex, and diverse datasets.

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