Dr. Lisa Wiese received her M.S. in Nursing from the University of Virginia, her Ph.D. in Nursing from Florida Atlantic University, (where she is an Associate Professor), and a post-graduate certificate in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from Drexel University. She is board-certified in Advanced Public Health Nursing, Gerontological Nursing, and Rural Health Nursing. Dr. Wiese is the recipient of over 5 million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health and Florida Department of Health. She was selected as a 2021 Hartford Distinguished Educator in Gerontological Nursing and 2023 Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. Dr. Wiese serves on the Florida State Health Improvement Plan taskforce, and co-launched a new Rural Health Disparities workgroup of the Alzheimer’s Association Diversity/Disparities PIA of ISTAART. She was selected to attend the first annual Alzheimer’s Association Interdisciplinary Summer Research Institute (2021). This workgroup's investigation into global rural health disparities was recently published in the Alzheimer's and Dementia journal. Dr. Wiese's community-based participatory research in the Glades, Florida region, is led by a multidisciplinary group of local faith-based health educators. This powerful collaboration of community partners, launched through state and federal funding, and now sustained by Palm Health Foundation, is focused on empowering rural, older racially/ethnically diverse adults to age in place through dementia awareness, detection, and management. The construct of determining “What Matters Most” to rural residents, based on Boykin and Schoenhofer’s “Nursing as Caring” framework, guides Dr. Wiese’s work. Her most recent funding, to address health concerns of Lake Okeechobee residents, is an outcome of this philosophy.