Paul Logan, PhD, ACNP-BC. A working acute-care nurse practitioner, a cardiology clinician of three decades, and graduate faculty in the ACNP program at Saint Joseph’s University — the same person across all of it.
The name started as a joke at summer camp. I don’t know how much you know about 14-year-old boys, but when the bunch of them (including mine) found out I’m a nurse, they found it hilarious and branded me “Nurse Logan.” My own kids took it from there. When I started teaching at Penn State it became “Professor Nurse Logan.” Then when I finished my PhD it morphed into “Doctor Professor Nurse Logan.” It’s a lot. But it also makes me laugh every time I hear it.
Before I was an NP I was a critical care nurse in cardiac surgery. That’s where I learned what sick actually looks like. Penn, 1994, one of the first acute care nurse practitioners in the country. Nobody knew what an ACNP was. The pay reflected that.
I spent the next decade at a cardiology practice outside Philadelphia. Inpatient, outpatient, procedural support, the whole range. Since then I’ve stayed in cardiology across several settings. Heart failure, arrhythmia, anticoagulation, prevention, pre- and post-procedural care. Thirty years in.
I’ve watched the specialty grow up. When I started, the cardiologists weren’t sure what to do with me. Now the ACNP is the backbone of most cardiology services in the country. That didn’t happen by accident. A lot of us showed up every day and did the work.
I still see patients. I don’t plan to stop.
I started teaching graduate students at Penn State and spent about a decade there. Lebanon Valley College along the way. Currently at Saint Joseph’s University in the ACNP graduate program, teaching advanced pharmacology, pathophysiology, and clinical reasoning. I’m also rebuilding the program curriculum against the new NONPF standards, because the field has moved and the training has to move with it.
My teaching philosophy is one sentence: my goal isn’t to teach you what to do with one patient, it’s to teach you how to think so you know what to do with every patient.
Outside the graduate program I’ve lectured at NONPF, AANP, both AACNs (the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses), the Pennsylvania Coalition of Nurse Practitioners, and the Student Nurses Association of Pennsylvania. I’ve lectured to family medicine residents at Chambersburg Hospital, to the APP critical care fellows at Hershey Medical Center, and to undergraduate pharmacology and toxicology majors in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at Penn State, which is a story for another time.
In 2024 I was named Peer Reviewer of the Year by The Nurse Practitioner journal. In 1999 I edited Principles of Practice for the Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, one of the first textbooks for the specialty. I chair the Big Ten Nursing Education Research Collaborative’s work on durable learning, which has produced four peer-reviewed papers and counting.
See talks and evaluations for where I’ve spoken and what attendees said.
Here’s what I think is actually happening.
Nursing education has a systems problem. The individual faculty are heroic. The curriculum infrastructure is held together with duct tape, PowerPoints from 2012, and the willingness of underpaid faculty to work weekends. When AI showed up, most of the academic conversation was about policing student use. That was the wrong conversation.
The right conversation is about what AI lets faculty do that they couldn’t do before. Build cases in minutes instead of hours. Write practice questions calibrated to current standards. Generate teaching content aligned to actual competencies. Spend the reclaimed hours watching a student take a history and telling them what they missed. That last part is the part machines can’t do and the part that actually makes clinicians.
So I’ve been building. NursingEdAI is the faculty-facing tool for producing teaching content. CertReady is the board prep product I wished existed when my students were graduating. APP Cardiology Academy is the specialty bridge new NPs need and don’t get in school.
Somebody once wrote that my ikigai is “building the education infrastructure that advanced practice nursing never had.” That’s about right.
Long-form writing. Clinical practice, NP education, and what AI is doing to both. No motivational framing. No “as a leader in the space.”
Also on TikTok and YouTube at the same handle, shorter format.
No reason this can’t be fun.
Heart failure, arrhythmia, anticoagulation, prevention, pre- and post-procedural care. Inpatient and outpatient. Thirty years in, still seeing patients.
AG-ACNP graduate program — advanced pharmacology, pathophysiology, and clinical reasoning. Rebuilding the curriculum against the new NONPF standards.
CertReady, the APP Cardiology Academy, and NursingEdAI — the education infrastructure advanced practice nursing never had.