Linda Oakley

Linda Denise Oakley, PhD is a UW-Madison Professor of Nursing and the Louis J., and Phyllis Clark Jacobs Professor in Mental Health. Dr. Oakley’s research focuses on the development of health promotion models to promote wellbeing in marginalized communities that have high rates of stress related illness and elaborate systems of colonial inequities in education, employment, income, housing, and healthcare. Her research includes Black communities with high rates of racialized hypertension, working women with high rates of self-stigmatizing depression, and adults with undertreated mental illness and high rates of the diseases of despair. Dr. Oakley’s community-based research, course on clinical judgment in mental health nursing and the psychosocial health needs of individuals, families, and communities, and academic practice as a psychiatric nurse practitioner have been recognized by the University of Wisconsin System, the African American Health Network of Dane County, the Wisconsin Women’s Health Foundation, Dane County National Alliance of the Mentally Ill, and her students.