UMSL’s Sheila Grisby set to be inducted into The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship

UMSL's Sheila Grisby set to be inducted into The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship

by Steve Walentik | Jul 17, 2026

From a young age, Sheila Grigsby felt called to serve her community, which first led her to pursue a career in nursing.

"It's the only thing that I've ever wanted to do," she said.

Grigsby, now a tenured associate professor and the PhD program coordinator in the College of Nursing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has kept the community at the center of her work across numerous roles over the past three decades.

Rather than following a typical path into patient care at a hospital after earning her BSN, Grigsby took a public health role working as an HIV/AIDS surveillance coordinator for the City of St. Louis Health Department. She later led Faith Communities United, which worked with local congregations on HIV-related issues, shaping its efforts around the pillars of awareness, prevention, compassion, and action. She has also spent time as a parish nurse at Union Avenue Christian Church and as a pregnancy prevention educator at Girls Inc. of St. Louis.

Since Grigsby - who holds master's degrees in public health and nursing along with a PhD - shifted full-time into an academic career in 2011 at UMSL, she has maintained connections with community health through her research and has been intentional about building a community-based clinical education program that gives College of Nursing students greater exposure to different ways they might serve their neighbors outside of acute care.

Her work made Grigsby an ideal candidate for membership in The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship, an international organization dedicated to advancing university-community collaborations addressing complex societal issues. ACES members include leading scholars and practitioners who bridge higher education and public life to drive collaborative research, democratic practice and community-informed policy.

Grigsby is set to join 23 other new members in a virtual induction ceremony on Wednesday, July 29.

Patricia Zahn, UMSL's Director of Community Engagement and Outreach, was inducted into ACES last year and championed Grigsby's nomination.

"Dr. Grigsby has consistently demonstrated a strong commitment to strengthening and supporting community-engaged scholarship both at UMSL and across the broader field," Zahn said. "Her work is benefiting colleagues, students and healthcare in the broader community, and I'm thrilled that her contributions as a community-engaged scholar are being recognized."

Zahn detailed a few of Grigsby's contributions in her nomination letter, beginning with her role in developing a Community-Based Participatory Research Series designed to support faculty and community members interested in conducting participatory research in the St. Louis region.

Grigsby has been involved in efforts to reduce overdose deaths among Black men in North St. Louis, working with colleagues in the Department of Psychological Sciences and the Missouri Institute of Mental Health. She deployed her expertise in developing community advisory boards and helped academic partners and community members define their purpose and goals while prioritizing their efforts in working with and supporting substance-using populations in metropolitan St. Louis. Grigsby co-authored a 2023 article related to that work in the Harm Reduction Journal.

She has also been involved in community collaboration aimed at reducing health disparities among youth in the St. Louis region. The work was supported by a Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award and involved the development of both adult and adolescent advisory boards to elicit their ideas on programming.

Arguably, Grigsby's widest impact thus far has been through the community-based clinical education program she developed after COVID, at a time when the College of Nursing was seeking different ways to ensure students could complete their needed clinical hours. The initiative she continues to direct now includes 40 community-based clinical placements, which give undergraduate nursing students the opportunity to develop their soft skills and connect with patients outside of an acute care setting.

"Traditionally, in an undergraduate program, students aren't introduced to community until the very last semester," Grigsby said. "Our program introduces community health throughout the traditional BSN curriculum, so that it helps students to really know that there are other career possibilities outside of bedside nursing after graduation.

"This program changes the way that students see the world. It also helps them apply the messages they hear in lectures by connecting the concepts of social drivers of health to real-world situations. Being able to apply that information in real-world terms in an uncontrolled setting has really helped students see the impact they can make as individual students and future nurses. Through this program, students see firsthand how the healthcare system is structured and the flaws it has. From there, we can start to have those critical conversations about policy and how things can be changed to make the lives of families and communities better."

Grigsby was humbled by her recognition from ACES.

"It's an honor to be selected into this society," she said, "and I am excited about the prospect of expanding my network beyond the St. Louis region."

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