Academic Staff

Donna Sabella

Assistant Academic Dean of Health Sciences
e-mail: sabellad@arcadia.edu

Donna Sabella is the newly appointed Assistant Academic Dean of Health Sciences. She is a mental health nurse and former faculty member at the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Nursing where she lectured in victimology, forensic mental health and loss, grief and bereavement. A former Program Director and a founding member of Dawn’s Place, a residential recovery program for trafficked and prostituted women in Philadelphia, she is currently founder and Director of Project Phoenix, (www.projectphoenixwebsite.com) an outreach program which provides support and facilitates groups for prostituted and trafficked women both in and out of prison in Philadelphia. She has presented at numerous conferences on prostitution and human trafficking-related issues and is a human trafficking consultant for the Office of Victims of Crime in Washington, D.C., and Director of Education for the National Research Consortium on Commercial Sexual Exploitation (NRC-CSE: http://picciuto.net/nrccse/about-us). She has experience working in crisis intervention, substance abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault and forensic nursing. In addition, she has provided direct services to vulnerable populations. She was recently appointed the contributing editor for the American Journal of Nursing’s Mental Health Matters column.

Aside from her nursing background (BSN from Thomas Jefferson University and MSN from Widener University), Donna holds degrees in Portuguese (BA from Indiana University), and English as a Second Language (M.Ed. from Temple University). Her Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. She lived and studied in Brazil, thanks to the Glenside Rotary Club to whom she is eternally grateful for the experience. She has taught Latin, English, English as a second language, Spanish, linguistics, world literature and writing, both at the secondary school level as well as at the university level. In addition, for many years she was the director of an international exchange program for college students between Ursinus College and Tohoku Gakuin University in Japan. She is looking forward to helping students and professionals in the health sciences experience the benefits of global study.