For Cheryl Sullivan, waiting a year to officially celebrate her doctoral degree from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs was the easy part. The COVID-19 pandemic may have kept her—and every other 2020 graduate—from the traditional Commencement ceremonies at Indiana University, but she’ll return this weekend for the doctoral hooding.
After 14 years in the program, and at the age of 69, Sullivan has earned it. She will join thousands of other 2020 and 2021 graduates in Memorial Stadium to participate in an official IU graduation ceremony.
The road to get there may have been long, but, as Sullivan notes, she had some really good excuses.
After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in biological sciences, she became a research assistant at the University of Notre Dame and later at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in Washington, D.C. She and her husband Frank moved to Bloomington while he attended the Maurer School of Law (the Hon. Frank Sullivan, Jr. would go on to spend nearly two decades on the Indiana Supreme Court). Health policy had always been an interest to Sullivan, who took a role with the Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis after Frank graduated from law school. It was while she was working there that Cheryl discovered the O’Neill School.
“I continued to explore opportunities around health policy, and SPEA fit my interests,” she said. She enrolled in the school’s Master of Science in Environmental Science (MSES) program, commuting back and forth from Indianapolis to Bloomington, all while managing the daily routines of the Sullivans’ three children.
“The SPEA program was unique,” she recalled. “I learned how to think critically about issues, how to frame policy issues accurately with appropriate data, and how to formulate reasonable policy alternatives. It was the MSES that launched my professional career in health policy.”
And what a career it has been.
After earning her MSES in 1986, Sullivan began a long career trajectory that put her in the center of some of the state’s and nation’s biggest policy challenges.
Gov. Evan Bayh asked her to serve as his executive assistant on health policy, and later he appointed her as cabinet secretary of the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, the state’s largest agency. There she helped restructure Indiana’s Medicaid program to reign in expenditures while still maintaining quality care for the state’s neediest citizens; linked federal and state resources to local planning councils to improve children’s services; directed the development of the nation’s most comprehensive welfare reform project; and oversaw the closure of a 400-bed mental health hospital while transitioning its patients to community-based care.
“I put into practice what I learned at SPEA every day,” she said. “I was able to think critically about issues that were incredibly important to citizens in this state and propose solutions.”
Following Gov. Bayh’s term, Sullivan was appointed vice chancellor for external affairs at IUPUI during which she worked with the IU president and Medical School dean to garner statewide support for funding biomedical research. She took a leave of absence from IUPUI, when then-Vice President Al Gore tapped her to be the national issues director for the 2000 Gore/Joe Lieberman presidential campaign, where she directed policy production and communications. After the tumultuous election fight between Gore and eventual winner George W. Bush ended, she returned to IUPUI. While there, she began taking graduate courses, exploring whether a doctoral degree was something she wanted to do. It was.
And so, in 2006, Cheryl Sullivan became an O’Neill School doctoral student.
By then she had been serving as deputy chief of staff for policy with Senator Evan Bayh, playing a central staff role in the development of major healthcare-related legislation, including the Nurses’ Higher Education and Loan Repayment Act, the Children’s Health Care Quality Act, and the Health Care for Members of the Armed Forces Exposed to Chemical Hazards Act.
When Bayh decided not to seek re-election in 2010, Sullivan was offered the opportunity to become the chief executive officer of the American Academy of Nursing.
“It began what was essentially an eight-year commute from Indianapolis to Washington, D.C. every week,” she said. Sullivan would board the 7:30 a.m. flight from Indianapolis International Airport to D.C. every Monday morning, returning on the late flight Thursday night.
Every week. For almost eight years.
“With each of these professional opportunities, I felt like I had to jump into them, even if my knees were shaking,” she said. “The positions were all so fascinating, yet time consuming. But I wanted to finish the Ph.D., and was challenged to find blocks of time to write while commuting.”
She left the Academy in 2018 and finally had the time and resources to devote to completing her dissertation. She had passed her oral and written exams years earlier.Her inspiration for the research and dissertation, was a significant issue that she had worked on while with Sen. Bayh.
“We became aware of National Guardsmen who had been exposed to sodium dichromate during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” she said. “A similar pattern began to emerge of military service members who decades earlier during the Vietnam War had come into contact with Agent Orange.”
Sullivan’s dissertation, Exposure to Complex Healthcare Challenges, used complexity theory to inform risk management of those occupational and environmental challenges. It was successfully defended in 2020.
And now, on May 7, Sullivan will finally walk across the IU Commencement stage as Dr. Cheryl Sullivan, Ph.D.
“I was the first person in my family to graduate from a four-year college,” she said. “My mother was the first in her family to graduate from high school. It was the support of my family, and my SPEA advisors like J.C. Randolph and Jim Perry, among other faculty that gave me the motivation to know I could reach the finish line. SPEA gave me the opportunity to develop and refine all of the skills necessary for an exceptionally fulfilling career. It took 14 years to earn the Ph.D., but I wouldn’t change a thing.”
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