Cathy Carter-Snell

Cathy (CJ) Carter-Snell is a Professor in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Mount Royal University in Calgary. She has worked with victims of trauma since 1977, including emergency, intensive care, flight teams, and has worked with sexual assault and domestic violence teams since 1998. She is the editor of the AFN's scholarly journal, the Journal of the Academy of Forensic Nursing (JAFN).

She coordinated and developed most of the courses for Mount Royal’s distance graduate certificate programs for both emergency nursing and forensic studies. She also teaches an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on violence across the lifespan at the university and an online SANE course. Her program of research is focused on prevention of violence or early effective intervention for trauma or abuse. She created the injury identification guide called BALD STEP which is in the new RCMP sexual assault kit and international forensic training. Carter-Snell also developed an Enhanced Emergency Sexual Assault Services (EESAS) program for multidisciplinary professionals in rural communities for which she received a national award. The multidisciplinary program is now used in at least two provinces and is used by Canadian Military nurses and military police. She is also involved in research on prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder in nursing students and graduates, male survivors of childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence, a dating violence prevention program for university students, injury identification, and prevention of mental illness after sexual assault and domestic violence.

Carter-Snell also is frequently called as an expert witness in provincial and federal courts on sexual assault injuries and examinations. She has won many awards for her forensic research and teaching including national nursing recognition as one of 100 nurses shaping nursing in Canada, a Sigma Theta Tau international dissertation award and recognition as one in 150 Canadians making a difference in mental health.