Mary Maryland PhD ’94 knows a thing or two about leadership. Her career spans service, advocacy and global health — from serving as a captain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Nurse Corps, to a stint consulting with NASA. She was president of the Illinois Nurses Association before she got her doctorate; upon receiving it, she became just the seventh African American to earn a PhD from the UIC College of Nursing.

“Because I've been able to try on different roles, my career has fit with the volunteer things that I've chosen to do,” Maryland says.

She has since led at the highest levels of her profession, including board service with the American Nursing Association, the American Nursing Foundation, the American Nursing Credentialing Center and the national board of the American Cancer Society. As she steps into her new role as president of the University of Illinois Chicago Alumni Board, she’s ready to focus her efforts on furthering UIC’s impact and making its countless stories of success and service known.

Maryland was hired by UIC’s College of Nursing as a recruiter in 1987, where she spent countless hours encouraging high school and community college students to consider nursing as a career path. A few years passed (during which she wrote a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded grant to introduce underrepresented elementary students to health careers), and the reasons she gave prospective students motivated her — a proud graduate of public education throughout Chicagoland — to attend UIC herself.

“I tell people I did my job too well,” Maryland says of recruiting herself for the PhD nursing program, which followed degrees from Malcolm X College, Chicago State University and Governor’s State University. As a student with 10 years experience as a registered nurse already, her leadership journey with UIC began as president of the Graduate Student Nurses Organization. Among other achievements, she advocated for graduate nursing students receiving money from the university for their program.

“All kinds of experiences were facilitated through my working and then becoming a student at UIC,” Maryland says, citing working in Rwanda for a year through a Human Resources for Health partnership as a prime example.

She continued in leadership roles at UIC after graduation and has been at the center of the university’s story for 35 years — all while maintaining an accomplished and varied career of her own. In addition to her board duties, Maryland serves as a primary care provider at WellBe Senior Medical. She’ll become president of the UIC Alumni Association on July 1, and one of her primary goals is to align community outreach with more contributions to the university.

“I think we do the programming and the recruitment and those kinds of things pretty well,” she says. “But I think as we look at taking better advantage of being in Chicago and telling our UIC story, our 360,000 graduates can help.”

Maryland’s vision of a university unpretentiously vocal about its successes comes from her own ideas about service, which she says have been with her since childhood. Achievement is just another opportunity to expand community and uplift those around you, as shown by the scholarship she started honoring her mentor Marguerite Dixon, the first African American PhD graduate of the College of Nursing.

“When I go into an organization, I go all in,” she says. “I think that we continue to strengthen the work we do together. See you at our next alumni event, or at a Flames game. Until next time.”