Alina has been a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) nurse since 2010. She often jokes that as an introvert and a fairly low-stimulation kind of person, she is working in a job where she doesn't belong. Yet her passion for nursing has only grown over time, despite all of its incredible demands, complexities, and growing moral dilemmas. It is not an easy profession to be in, which makes her fight all the more fiercely for herself and her colleagues to find, rediscover, reframe, and sustain a deep sense of meaning and calling for the work we do.

Published Writing:

She has published work in American Journal of Nursing and blogs regularly for them on Off the Charts. She has also published work in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work, and The Healer’s Burden: Stories and Poems of Professional Grief.

• Her TEDxTalk with TEDxPasadena in 2017 on “How Grief Can Enable Nurses to Endure” (which was promoted to the main TED.com page in 2020 as “How Grief Helped Me Become a Better Caregiver.”)