Dr. Nancy Walton is the Director of and Associate Professor in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Ryerson University.  She holds a PhD in Nursing with completion of the Collaborative Program in Bioethics from the University of Toronto (2003) and an undergraduate degree in nursing science from Ryerson (1992). Nancy served as Special Advisor to the Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development in 2017-18. She is currently the Chair of the Research Ethics Board at Women’s College Hospital and is a member of the Health Canada Public Health Agency of Canada’s Research Ethics Board. She is a special advisor to NextEd Canada.

She has published and presented in the areas of priority setting and decision-making in health care, internet-based research, research ethics board composition and mandates, risk in social science and humanities research and the legal and ethical concerns in research involving children and adolescents.

Dr. Walton previously served as a Council member of the National Council on Ethics in Human Research (NCEHR). She was a longstanding community member and member with expertise in ethics of the Research Ethics Board at the Hospital for Sick Children as well as a founding member of the Research Ethics Board at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. She previously served as Chair of the Ryerson University Research Ethics Board from 2004-2013.

She is the Canadian author of the textbook Ethics and Issues in Contemporary Nursing (Nelson) and the co-editor of Leading and Managing in Canadian Nursing (Elsevier, 2019). The textbook Paediatric Patient and Family-Centred Care: Ethical and Legal Issues (Springer)includes a chapter by Dr. Walton entitled “Participation in Paediatric Research Studies.”

Nancy tries to keep up with co-authoring the  Research Ethics Blog, the Nursing Ethics Blog, with her partner, Dr. Chris MacDonald.

Her blog, Life With Georgia, talks about the day-to-day experiences of parenting a child with special needs.

Nancy has a 19 year old daughter, Georgia, who has autism spectrum disorder.

She can be contacted at nwalton@ryerson.ca