Dr. Koons is an Assistant Professor at Villanova University College of Nursing and a clinically active nurse on a Cardiothoracic Surgical Intensive Care Unit. Dr. Koons has over a decade of clinical experience caring for critically ill patients in the intensive care unit, including lung and heart transplant candidates and recipients. As a clinical nurse, she has developed first-hand knowledge of the challenges that patients and their families encounter across the transplantation trajectory. This has motivated her to dedicate her program of research to improving the experiences and outcomes for transplant patients and their families. Dr. Koons has studied important patient centered outcomes in lung transplantation including symptoms, symptom burden, and frailty. Dr. Koons is also interested in how patients and caregivers work as a dyad to manage post-transplant self-care and the impact dyadic self-care has on outcomes.