State & Society

Irena Milaniak, PhD, DSc

Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University

imilaniak@uafm.edu.pl

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6649-7545

Graduate of the Faculty of Health Sciences of the Jagiellonian University Medical College (MSc in Nursing) and AGH University of Krakow (MSc in Marketing), specialist in cardiac nursing. Her doctoral dissertation, Assessment of Selected Determinants of Quality of Life in Patients after Heart Transplantation, was defended at the Faculty of Medicine of the Jagiellonian University Medical College in 2014. She was awarded the postdoctoral degree of doctor habilitatus in the field of medical and health sciences, in the discipline of health sciences, by the Faculty of Health Sciences of the Jagiellonian University Medical College on 29 April 2020. Her scientific achievement was a series of thematically related publications under the collective title Biopsychosocial Functioning of Heart Transplant Recipients.

Since 1992, she has been employed at the John Paul II Specialist Hospital in Krakow, in the Clinical Department of Cardiac, Vascular and Transplant Surgery, Transplantology and Mechanical Circulatory Support Unit, and currently in the Department of Transplantology and Mechanical Circulatory Support, as a coordinating nurse. Since 2017, she has worked at Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University, where she has held the following positions: Head of the Department of Nursing since 2020, Dean’s Representative for the Nursing programme from 2017 to 2024, and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences since 2024.

Membership in scientific societies and associations: International Transplant Nurses Society; Polish Nurses Association — Chair of the Circle at the John Paul II Specialist Hospital in Krakow and member of the Board of the Małopolska Branch; International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation; The European Society for Organ Transplantation; European Transplant Allied Healthcare Professionals — Board Member from 2018 to 2023; Polish Association of Transplant Coordinators — founding member of the Association.

Research interests: nursing care, transplant medicine, cardiac surgery and cardiology, and mechanical circulatory support.