Luzviminda Miguel, Associate Professor of Nursing
Associate Professor Miguel’s area of expertise and research is in clinical and policy approaches for obstetric clinical practice, healthcare policy, and community asthma management.
Posted June 18, 2026.
Luzviminda Miguel is an associate professor of nursing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. Based at UH Hilo’s School of Nursing, Associate Professor Miguel’s area of expertise and research is in clinical and policy approaches for obstetric clinical practice, healthcare policy, and community asthma management. This includes a focus on academic-related inquiries into nursing education, student incivility, and AI integration in teaching.
Specifically in her research, Miguel is exploring how nursing student incivility toward faculty impacts teaching excellence. As part of this inquiry, she is also examining educator competencies, specifically in aligning student perceptions of the “ideal nurse educator” with World Health Organization core competencies to mitigate classroom incivility.
And in her investigations into AI in education, she is evaluating AI as an “opponent” or “evidence” source to enhance clinical judgment in prelicensure students.
Miguel, who served as a licensed practical nurse at the now-named Hilo Benioff Medical Center in the 1990s and then as a registered nurse at Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children on Oʻahu in the early 2000s, received her master in nursing education in 2012 from Walden University based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and her doctor of nursing practice in 2016 from UH Mānoa.
Following her position as an associate professor of nursing (a rank she achieved in 2022) and division chair of nursing and allied health at Hawaiʻi Community College, she arrived at UH Hilo in 2024. In May of 2026, she received the UH Hilo Koichi and Taniyo Taniguchi Award for Excellence and Innovation; the annual award recognizes creativity in teaching, scholarship, and artistic production at UH Hilo.
Rooted in community: “I want to ensure our local health needs are met with a seamless blend of rigorous clinical expertise and genuine, place-based care”
Associate Professor Miguel says her choice of expertise is deeply personal.
“Living here in Volcano, I see firsthand how intimately our physical environment shapes our collective well-being,” she says. “My own family navigates the daily realities of asthma, and when you live in a place where Kīlauea’s eruptions constantly introduce vog and ash into your own backyard, public health stops being an abstract textbook concept. It becomes the literal air my loved ones and my neighbors breathe. That is what drives me every single day. I want to ensure our local health needs are met with a seamless blend of rigorous clinical expertise and genuine, place-based care.”
Miguel’s significant contributions to the literature began early with her master’s thesis on “Using Simulation Role Play in Nursing Healthcare Policy and Politics,” which earned the Sigma Theta Tau Best Poster Award in Minneapolis 2013.
She later completed her doctoral thesis on the development of the Kaʻū Community Asthma Management Program (KCAMP), which earned her the UH Mānoa Dean’s Research Award of the Year and a 2020 publication in Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal. Among her most important findings during the development of the program, she discovered that a bottom-up, community-participatory model was significantly more effective at managing asthma in rural, underserved populations than traditional, top-down clinical approaches.
“By prioritizing community participation over standard clinical mandates, the KCAMP program proved that rural healthcare is more effective when it is collaborative and culturally tailored,” says Miguel. “Specifically, honoring patients’ traditional health practices and preferences led to better asthma management, higher medication compliance, and fewer exacerbations.”
Miguel has also contributed to the development of federal policy that targets serious nationwide problems also faced by Hawaiʻi communities, including Hawaiʻi Island: nursing workforce shortages. She co-authored the 17th, 18th, and 19th reports to the U.S. Congress as a member of the National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice, targeting workforce and faculty shortages (see “Mitigating Nursing Workforce Challenges by Optimizing Learning Environments,” 2024 report).
Student incivility: “I’ve found that the best way to disrupt this choreography isn’t through purely punitive discipline, but by operationalizing the Aloha Spirit”
Among her most important work, Miguel also notes a recent paper, “Transforming challenges into opportunities: Students’ incivility, the WHO nurse educator competencies, and perceptions of an ideal nurse” (Nurse Education Today, 2026). She says the topic of student incivility may at first seem like “a sharp left turn” with her roots so anchored in community health, but this line of inquiry also stems from her personal observations.
“Many of us were trained in a very rigid, traditional environment of institutional ‘don’ts,’ so encountering a disruptive, defensive, or disengaged cohort can be a real shock to the system,” she explains. “In my recent work, ‘Transforming Challenges into Opportunities,’ I took a deep dive into this because the systemic stakes are simply too high to ignore. When incivility goes unchecked, it takes a massive emotional toll on educators. Faculty quit — which directly worsens the severe shortages we are already facing — and the resulting gaps in training can ultimately become downright dangerous to patient safety.”
Miguel includes her students in this line of inquiry, engaging them as active participants in studies on incivility and educator traits. What she’s found most fascinating is discovering that students don’t actually want complete leniency or a lack of structure. In fact, she found students deeply value ethical authority, fairness, and consistent professional boundaries.
“What we’re really witnessing is a profound ‘expectation-action gap,'” she says. “Students enter this field hungry for human connection and approachable mentors, but they often perceive faculty as distant, rigid, or punitive due to our own crushing workloads and the high-pressure environment of modern nursing programs. This disconnect sparks what I call the ‘dance of incivility,’ a reciprocal cycle of stress where a lack of transparent communication feels like dismissiveness to the student, leading to disengagement, which the faculty then interprets as personal disrespect.”
Interestingly, Miguel then returns to her island roots to make sense of, and find solutions for, these unfortunate perceptions.
“I’ve found that the best way to disrupt this choreography isn’t through purely punitive discipline, but by operationalizing the Aloha Spirit — compassion, mutual respect, and cultural humility — as a core professional competency,” she says. “We have to set unyielding professional boundaries while remaining authentically present as educators. If we intentionally model that respect in the classroom, our students will naturally mirror it at the patient’s bedside.”
The use of AI in teaching: “It is absolutely not here to replace the human heartbeat of nursing; it is here to enhance it”
In her investigations into the use of AI in teaching, Miguel finds that the same exact philosophy of human-centered adaptation she advocates for in a civil classroom also applies here.
“I see AI as the next logical step in our pedagogical evolution, much like when our profession first adopted healthcare informatics or high-fidelity simulation mannequins,” Associate Professor Miguel explains. “It is absolutely not here to replace the human heartbeat of nursing; it is here to enhance it.”
In her research, she’s exploring how AI can serve as a supportive “scaffold” for clinical judgment.
“For instance, AI can help students quickly synthesize massive volumes of complex literature and pinpoint knowledge gaps,” says Miguel. “This effectively offloads the cognitive busywork, freeing up their mental energy for high-level analysis and actual, hands-on patient care. The key, of course, is strict human oversight. Just like simulation labs, AI creates a psychologically safe space to fail, pivot, and learn, beautifully preparing them for an increasingly digital healthcare landscape.”
Ultimately, she says, whether she’s managing a complex classroom dynamic or integrating a new AI tool, it all comes back to professional socialization.
“My overarching goal is to help students internalize the core values, ethics, and resilience they need to step out into the world as safe, compassionate nurses. That is how we intentionally transition our educational ecosystems away from a vicious cycle of hostility and toward a virtuous system of professional accountability.”
Building a strong foundation for long-term dreams
With an eye to the future of island healthcare, Miguel serves as a doctoral project advisor for UH Hilo doctor of nursing practice students while also mentoring undergraduate evidence-based projects. She also instills in her students the responsibility of active advocacy on policy, notably by guiding her DNP students to testify for healthcare bills at the Hawaiʻi State Legislature.
She’s also looking toward institutional expansion in programs and infrastructure at UH Hilo. She’s planning to secure benefactors to fund a dedicated nursing building for UH Hilo, and coupled with this, looking at expanding the program to increase School of Nursing capacity to graduate transcultural nurses and address global shortages. In tandem with this would be securing grants and external funding for student scholarships and lab supplies.
Ultimately, she sees the inevitable expansion of nursing education and research into a more and more interdisciplinary field with the integration of nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage data, systems, and technology in healthcare.
“My long-term dream is to launch the first nursing informatics program in the state of Hawai’i,” she says.
By Susan Enright, public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
