Joan Liaschenko is originally from Philadelphia where she completed basic nursing studies and obtained a BS from Hahnemann University and an MA from Bryn Mawr College. She migrated west where she obtained an MS, PhD, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She joined the University of Minnesota Faculty in January of 2001 where she is jointly appointed in the Center for Bioethics and the School of Nursing.
Both her research and teaching are largely informed by feminist scholarship. She teaches masters and doctoral students in the School of Nursing, which is noteworthy for their commitment to ethics education, requiring ethics at all educational levels: baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral.
Through the Center for Bioethics, she has taught courses on `The Social Construction of Health and Illness´ and `Stories of Illness,´ a course that relies primarily on the writings of ill people.
Her major research interest is the morality of nursing work, specifically, the ways in which the context of the work shapes nurses' moral concerns, the language they use to articulate them, and how they seek to resolve them. She has studied home care, intensive care unit, and psychiatric nurses as well as nurses who run biomedical clinical trials.
She has published widely and has been a visiting scholar in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Turkey, and upcoming, New Zealand.
She holds adjunct faculty appointments at the Universities of Toronto and Calgary.