The Hofstra Northwell School of Nursing has appointed Kristy Loewenstein as its permanent dean.
Loewenstein has more than two decades of experience practicing nursing at both Queens Zucker Hillside Hospital and Amityville’s South Oaks Hospital, where she has served as deputy chief nursing officer since 2021, according to her LinkedIn. Both are Northwell operations.
“Dr. Loewenstein’s experience and commitment to students, faculty, and the health care community position her well to lead the school in its next phase of growth,” said Susan Poser, Hofstra’s president. “I look forward to working with her in this role.”
“This is a defining moment for health care education,” Loewenstein said. “I am honored to lead a school that combines state-of-the-art facilities, a deeply committed faculty, and a student body dedicated to service.”
She first joined Hofstra in October 2024 as the interim dean of the School of Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies.
At the time, Loewenstein said that one of her major focuses would be competency-based training, ensuring that graduating nurses would be ready for the real-world clinical environment. She has also worked to increase interdisciplinary learning for nursing and PA students, expanding collaboration with the medicine, health sciences, and counseling programs, for example.
This past spring Hofstra’s first cohort of undergraduate nursing students earned their degrees under her leadership. The new dean takes charge of the program amid growing investment from the university, which opened a $75 million facility in 2023 dedicated in part to the nursing school.
“Our partnership with Hofstra University continues to grow stronger through leaders like Dr. Loewenstein, who represent the best of Northwell’s clinical and nursing excellence,” said Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health.
Loewenstein earned her associate’s degree in nursing at the now-defunct Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers in New York. Later she collected bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the same discipline at Stony Brook, with her graduate education focused on psychiatric mental health. Loewenstein completed her Ph.D. in nursing at the Medical University of South Carolina in 2019.
She has educational experience from her time as an adjunct clinical instructor at Adelphi University, where she taught psychiatric nursing students during their clinical rotations between 2011 and 2019.
