Dr. Aaron McColpin, DNP, Ed.S, RN, FNP, ENP, RRT
California State University Channel Islands, United States of America
Biography:
Dr. Aaron McColpin is an Associate Professor of Nursing and Assistant Chair at California State University Channel Islands, where he has taught since 2015. In that role he leads the university’s new community college-to-BSN pathway, developed in partnership with Allan Hancock College and Ventura College, and helps guide the department’s graduate program development, having chaired or co-chaired the Nursing Graduate Committee since 2020.
His teaching career spans two decades and multiple modalities. Before joining CSUCI he taught advanced medical-surgical nursing, pharmacology, and simulation at Umpqua Community College, delivered graduate pharmacology courses online for St. Joseph’s College of Maine, and served as Program Director for RN-BSN Nursing and BS Respiratory Therapy at Independence University, where he oversaw clinical education across more than three hundred sites for one of the largest respiratory care programs in the country.
Dr. McColpin remains an active clinician. Since 2020 he has practiced as a nurse practitioner with Cottage Health in Ventura, seeing patients of all ages in urgent care and at the Grotenhuis Pediatric Clinic. He previously spent more than a decade in emergency medicine, including six years as an emergency department nurse practitioner at the Level II trauma center at Ventura County Medical Center and six years at St. John’s Regional Medical Center. His clinical foundation is unusually broad, beginning in respiratory therapy — he remains a registered respiratory therapist with neonatal/pediatric and pulmonary function credentials — before moving into emergency and family practice.
His scholarship centers on how personality and disease acceptance shape health-related quality of life in chronic pulmonary illness, alongside work on emergency department readmissions, NSTEMI management, and complementary therapies in pulmonary rehabilitation. He has published in Health Science Journal, F1000Research, AARC Times, and the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation & Prevention, and presents regularly at national nursing and respiratory care conferences.
He holds an EdS from American College of Education, a DNP from Maryville University, and an MSN and BSN from Graceland University, and is a Certified Nurse Educator through the NLN.