The nursing program at Upstate began as an associate’s degree and admitted its first class in September 1959. Maja C. Anderson, who had a master’s degree from Yale University, directed the program from its inception until her retirement in 1975. This was the fourth associate degree program in nursing in New York State and the first of its kind in the Upstate New York area, and 7 students graduated from the first class in 1961. The first black nursing graduate was Gwendolyn Snellings Lipscomb, who earned her AAS in 1968 and went on to become the Director of the Division of Minority Health in the Alabama Department of Public Health. A nurse practitioner certificate program was established under the direction of Margaret D. Sovie in 1974 because of the need for primary care nurses, and it was supported primarily by federal grant funds. This program graduated approximately 300 nurse practitioners before it was superseded by the nursing education program, which Dr. M. Janice Nelson created in 1984 to offer a combined BS and MS in nursing. Nelson was the director of nursing at university hospital from 1980 to 1986, and when this program became the college of nursing in 1986, Nelson served as its first dean until 1996. A separate bachelor of science in nursing program was established in 1988, and in 1991, full initial accreditation was granted to both the bachelor of science and the combined bachelor of science and master of science programs. In 1992, a separate master of science nursing program was established to prepare clinical nurse specialists, and in 1994, a grant was received from the state to create and implement a master of science program, which was designed to prepare advanced practice nurses for the role of clinical nurse specialist or nurse practitioner. One of most prominent professors from the college of nursing was Susan Bastable, who wrote Nurse as Educator: Principles of Teaching and Learning for Nursing Practice, which was the Book of the Year for The American Journal of Nursing in 1997; she left Upstate in 2003 to found the baccalaureate program in nursing at Le Moyne College. A continuing award of accreditation by the national league for nursing was received in 1996, and in 2004, the college was accredited by the commission on collegiate nursing education of the American association of colleges of nursing. In 2009, a family psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner program was created, and a doctorate in nursing practice program was started in 2013, which was the first in the area. The second dean was Elvira Szigeti from 1998 to 2012, the third dean was Joyce Griffin-Sobel from 2013 to 2016, and the fourth and current dean is Tammy Austin-Ketch.