Late nursing professor’s inspiration lives on in undergraduate researcher

When Madison Beavers signed up for the College of Nursing’s animal-assisted therapy course back in 2021, she didn’t realize she was about to meet the mentor who would set her career path in motion: Stuart Pope, a beloved nursing faculty member who passed away in 2023.

“The day after I got into nursing school, Dr. Pope said to me, ‘Hey, nurse. What are we doing next? When are you applying to nurse practitioner school?’” she recalled. “He told me I couldn’t just stop with my bachelor’s; I had to keep going.”

Beavers will begin her nursing career as an emergency department nurse at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

And that’s exactly what Beavers is doing. A native of Canton, Georgia, she graduates this month with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and will begin Auburn’s Master of Science in Nursing program next fall. The experience she’s gained in teaching, research and patient care over the last four years has led her to set her goals high: after completing a master’s, she wants to pursue a doctorate, postdoctoral research and, eventually, a position in academia.

A mentor for life

As a first-year pre-nursing student in Pope’s animal-assisted therapy course, Beavers found the subject matter so engaging that she also joined the extracurricular club he founded. Knowing Beavers as a good student from both class and the club, Pope offered her part-time work assisting him with his dialysis treatments for kidney disease.

Dialysis, which uses a machine to filter the body’s blood, allowed Pope to continue teaching and Beavers to gain valuable knowledge from him as they chatted through the lengthy treatment sessions.

Before she was even accepted into the nursing program, Pope was encouraging her to become involved in research.

“I’m so grateful he took the time to see something in me as a young student and pour his knowledge into me,” she said. “His guidance truly made me the student researcher I am today.”

Campy research

Beavers knew that Pope’s kidney disease was a secondary illness caused by Type 1 diabetes. In considering potential research topics, she realized she wanted to help patients with Type 1 diabetes avoid developing those secondary conditions, called co-morbidities. She was paired with Assistant Professor Christine Feely and immediately began studying how families manage diabetes in children on a daily basis.

“I took my love for pediatrics and for Dr. Pope and research, and I wondered, if they already have one lifelong condition, why do they have to have another? I really wanted to look at how to best manage it to prevent these other lifelong conditions from occurring,” she said.

Beavers began by visiting with families served by Camp Seale Harris, an organization that offers medically supervised camps and events for children with diabetes across the Southeast.

“The foundations I build my research around actually come from my conversations with those kids and learning what they struggled with,” she said.

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Beavers was named an Undergraduate Research Fellow, and after a year of data collection and analysis, she won best College of Nursing poster presentation at the 2025 Auburn Research Symposium. When she enters graduate school, she already knows she’ll be studying ways to better communicate proper pediatric diabetes management practices to reduce comorbidities.

More than research

In addition to research, Beavers has gained experience in leadership and teaching. She was a peer instructor for the college’s Learning Community course and served as a mentor for pre-nursing students entering the nursing program.

“The mentoring program is for those first few semesters when they’re trying to figure out everything that goes along with nursing school,” she said. “It’s very different than other majors; you’re balancing full-time school and traveling for clinicals, and it can take a while to learn how to carry it all.”

After Pope’s passing, she and fellow nursing student Mackenzie Smith picked up the reigns to lead the animal-assisted therapy club, planning outreach projects with community organizations and bringing speakers to campus.

“We really wanted to keep Dr. Pope’s legacy alive,” she said. “We do a lot of different service projects with animals, and it’s not just dogs.”

Future plans

This February, Beavers will begin a full-time job as an emergency department nurse at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; come fall, she’ll also be balancing research and graduate school coursework. She intends to eventually practice as a primary care nurse practitioner and enroll in Auburn’s Doctor of Nursing Practice program, with the goal of teaching the next generation of nurses.

“If you ask me what my dream education route would be, I would love to continue on to get my doctorate in nursing practice and my postdoc in nursing education, because I would love to come back and teach,” she said.