UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Long before Donald Bucher became a nurse practitioner and advanced practice leader, a group of intensive care unit nurses saw something in him.
Bucher was working as an orderly at Hamot Medical Center while studying biology at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, with no plans to become a nurse. But working alongside ICU staff, he was drawn to what the nurses did, and they, in turn, took him under their wing, teaching him skills, talking him through their work and encouraging his growing interest in critical care.
That encouragement set his course. Bucher transferred to a diploma nursing program in Sharon, Pennsylvania, near where he grew up, and went on to earn his bachelor of science in nursing at the Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing program at Penn State Shenango. At a time when ICU positions for new graduates were uncommon, the same nurses who had mentored Bucher continued to advocate for him. One of them, a night-shift nurse named Peggy, urged her supervisor to hire him when a position opened. He went on to work with that team for seven years.
“Knowing that people were invested in me succeeding meant the world to me,” Bucher said. “It made me believe that I could do it.”
Today, Bucher is vice chair of advanced practice in the Department of Medicine at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, an assistant professor at Penn State College of Medicine, and a 2025 graduate of the Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing’s Adult Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner certificate program.
In recognition of his leadership, advocacy and service to nursing, Bucher recently received the college’s Alumni Achievement Award, the college’s most distinguished alumni honor. The award, formerly called the Novosel Award, is presented to an alumnus who has profoundly impacted the field of nursing through visionary leadership, innovation, mentorship and service.
Throughout his career, Bucher has carried forward the example those ICU nurses had set for him, using his experience and position to open doors for others.
After becoming an acute care nurse practitioner, Bucher joined his state nurse practitioner organization, with the understanding that professional organizations are often where changes to clinical practice begin. He went on to take leadership roles with the Pennsylvania Coalition of Nurse Practitioners and to push for changes such as allowing nurse practitioners to pronounce death and sign death certificates.
“Clinical practice doesn’t change unless you explain to a legislator why clinical practice needs to change,” Bucher said.
His advocacy drew notice, and a call from the governor’s office in 2022 led to an appointment to the Pennsylvania State Board of Nursing. He also joined the board of the LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania, working to ensure that the Center’s programing and funding continue to advance necessary services.
For much of his career, Bucher worked in critical care. But the demands of inpatient medicine, heightened during COVID-19 pandemic, wore on him. His commitment to patients had not changed, he said, but he temporarily lost some of the passion he once had for the work itself.
That led him back to school. In 2025, Bucher earned his Adult Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner certificate from Penn State’s Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing, completing the program while continuing to work.
Through the program, he completed clinical time in primary care, HIV care, gender-affirming care and LGBTQ health. The certificate helped Bucher move into adult-gerontology primary care and outpatient practice. He now practices at an underserved clinic in Harrisburg, where he cares for a diverse patient population, including many Medicaid patients, immigrants and others who may face barriers to health care access.
“It really revitalized me professionally,” Bucher said. “I found my passion again.”
Alongside his clinical work, Bucher leads at the systems level as vice chair of advanced practice in the Department of Medicine at Hershey Medical Center, supporting nurse practitioners and physician assistants across the department.
In this role, Bucher has helped launch new care models, including a nephrology telehealth program for high-risk patients after discharge, an acute gastroenterology clinic offering same-day visits with an advanced practice provider, and an inpatient diabetes management service.
All the while, mentorship has remained central to how Bucher understands his work. He said he tries to offer newer providers the same kind of support he received from the ICU nurses who helped launch his career.
In one case, Bucher hired a new physician assistant and made a point of checking in, offering guidance and advocating for him when a specialty opportunity became available. The physician assistant later wrote about Bucher’s mentorship in a doctoral-level program leadership paper.
“Those nurses, they spent time with me, they taught me things, they talked about what it meant to be an ICU nurse. I would not be where I am without them,” Bucher said. “It’s my obligation to do that for the next generation of nurses and nurse practitioners.”