Portia Zaire brings cancer prevention research to UC Nursing

"Oh, I see why you keep going to the hospital, because you don't have any money to pay for the insulin," she recalls realizing. "I see why: you ran out of your asthma medication and couldn't get it replenished, and now you have an asthma attack."

That shift in view, from the patient to the system around them, now drives her research. Dr. Zaire recently joined the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing as a tenure-track assistant professor, arriving from a National Cancer Institute (NCI) T32 postdoctoral fellowship in cancer health services research at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Zaire went into nursing for the same reason many students do: she wanted to help people. But nursing school opened her eyes to a profession far broader than she had imagined.

"I had no idea the impact and the knowledge that you needed. I had no idea about the different roles. My mind was blown. My paradigm was shifted," she says.

In 2018, Dr. Zaire transitioned to academia, recruited to help build a primary care nursing program. As she settled into her new role, colleagues began encouraging her to pursue a doctorate. She wasn't interested.

"I'm like, I'm never going back to school. You can just stop that right now," she says with a laugh.

Then a PhD-prepared mentor sat her down. Why aren't nurses used to the top of their license in primary care? Why are care models so unstable? The mentor's answer: the questions you keep asking, you can be the one to answer. Within a year, she had applied to and been accepted into a PhD program, which she completed in 2024.

Dr. Zaire's doctoral and postdoctoral work centered on timely access to colorectal cancer screening. When cancer is discovered at later stages, health outcomes are worse.

Today she describes herself as a cancer health services researcher, focusing on how the health system delivers care at each point along the cancer continuum, from screening through diagnosis, treatment and survivorship.

"My research is really looking at how the health care system delivers the appropriate care at each of those time points," she says. "Is it an interdisciplinary team that's delivering this care? And if it is, what are the aspects of the team that make this care timely and effective?"

Her promise as a researcher has drawn national support. Dr. Zaire holds an NCI Loan Repayment Program award for clinical research (2025–2027) and was an AcademyHealth Policy and Politics in Nursing Scholar. She was recently elected to the advisory board of AcademyHealth's Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues.

Prior to joining the UC College of Nursing, Dr. Zaire worked on federally funded
Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) aimed at strengthening the nursing workforce and improving access to care. The work helped build expertise in workforce development, healthcare delivery, and educational innovation that now informs her teaching, research, and service at UC.

Now she wants to pay forward the mentorship that changed her own path.

"Somebody sat me down and said, let's have a conversation," she says. "What if somebody hadn't had that conversation with me? I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now. The biggest draw for me was being able to train and educate the next generation of nurse leaders, whether it's in practice or in research."

Her arrival reflects the college's investment in research that changes how care reaches people, especially those the health system too often misses. Dr. Zaire's work sits where nursing, health policy and cancer prevention meet. It asks a question every nurse eventually faces: Why aren't patients getting better, and what can we change?

For Dr. Zaire, the answer starts upstream, long before a patient lands back in a hospital bed. "These are systemic problems that patients carry around with them every day," she says. At UC, she will study those problems, test better ways to deliver care and help a new generation of nurses ask the kinds of questions that once sent her back to school.