Just a month on the job, the new dean of the College of Nursing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville is excited about the future.

And he’s not willing to let the highly successful nursing program rest on its past laurels.

“I’m extremely proud of our faculty and staff,” Dr. Hyochol Brian Ahn said. “We have exceptional faculty dedicated to our students’ success. Our first-time passing rate is 98% for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX).”

The most recent national average for registered nurses is 86.7%. UAH has rated 90% or above for the past 10 years, with graduates reaching 99% or 100% in each of the last five years.

Ahn cited UAH’s strong nurse practitioner program and the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner program developed last year as examples of the college growing to meet the healthcare needs of the community.

He now wants to take it a step further with a certified registered nurse anesthetist (CRNA) program.

“CRNAs are essential for any surgeries,” he said. “Even dental surgery needs a CRNA. Our CRNA will be one of a very few schools in Alabama as well as in the United States.

“There are only about 100 CRNA programs in the United States, with just three located in Alabama. We are working with Huntsville Hospital to develop our inaugural CRNA program.”

Along with leading the College of Nursing and directing UAH’s Huntsville Hospital Health partnership, Ahn is the director of a new Brain Digital Technology Innovation Laboratory.

“We are building the lab, and we are developing brain stimulation therapy especially for persons with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “There is no cure, but we can develop some brain stimulation therapy.”

Ahn completed a $2.4 million National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Nursing Research grant in 2025 that combined home-based transcranial direct current stimulation and mindfulness-based meditation to manage pain in older adults with knee osteoarthritis, and he produced more than 120 publications.

He is involved in a $2.3 million Department of Defense (DOD) grant for treating pain and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans.

“When I moved here, I brought my DOD project here,” Ahn said. “I’m working with the University of Texas Health Science Center to do the multi-site clinical trial for brain stimulation therapy for veterans with PTSD.

“I’m working with many science projects based on my previous NIH project and current DOD project.”

Ahn is also using his own collegiate and work background to combine UAH’s engineering accolades with his research. He has a bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and nursing; master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering and in medical sciences; and Ph.D.s in electrical and computer engineering and nursing.

His healthcare vision harmonizes with the longstanding collaboration between UAH Nursing and the College of Engineering’s Systems Management and Production Center. Since 2020, SMAP has developed and manufactured training models to help students practice essential skills for treating patients.

“This is a true example of how engineering and nursing work together to make better education and better practice,” Ahn said, “and it’s not only in nurse and nurse practitioner programs. My dream is to build a nursing engineering program at UAH at some point in time.

“There are some universities that have biomedical engineering, but there is no nursing engineering. Nursing engineering is focusing on those kinds of technology for our nurses and nurse practitioners for decision making. That is one of my dreams, and that’s why I came to nursing.”