Jenna Hatcher

Dr. Hatcher is Vice Provost and Special Advisor to the Provost. In these roles, she leads Campus Community Connections, a unit reporting to the Office of the Provost, with a mission to support internal campus community groups, external community councils, and programming that fosters an environment where all communities are connected, valued, and able to thrive.

Dr. Hatcher is also a professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and Associate Director of Community Outreach and Engagement at the University of Arizona Cancer Center. In this role, she oversees the Office of Community Outreach and Engagement and demonstrates a strong commitment to engaging communities for improved health and educational outcomes. As the leader of community engagement for the Cancer Center, her work includes establishing and leading the Community Advisory Board—composed of members from communities across the state—collaborating with Indigenous communities to implement vital cancer prevention initiatives, and developing programming such as the Research Outreach for Southern Arizona program, which aims to improve cancer outcomes for communities throughout Southern Arizona.

Dr. Hatcher’s background is rooted in nursing and public health. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing from West Virginia University, and holds both a Master of Public Health and a Ph.D. in Nursing from the University of Kentucky.

Her research and initiatives in higher education over the past two decades have focused on collaborations within and across communities. Prior to that, she spent two decades working as a nurse in the clinical areas of critical care, intensive care, and psychiatric care. Her community-engaged research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2006, with a concentration on communities that have experienced disparate health outcomes, especially those related to cancer.

Before joining the University of Arizona, Dr. Hatcher served as the inaugural leader of inclusion for the College of Nursing at the University of Kentucky, where she led initiatives to embed inclusive values into the college’s strategic plan, classrooms, and community. In this role, she was instrumental in helping the College of Nursing acknowledge and celebrate multiple communities.