Caring for people is just second nature to Dr. Suzanne Weller Gross, a West Virginia University nurse-turned-administrator.

In her 48-year career, she’s tended to premature infants in the neonatal unit and overworked nursing students grappling with the all-encompassing demands of both the classroom and the clinic. She’s counseled breast cancer patients and their families and once took a financially strapped student into her own homeso that student could stay in school and fulfill her dream of becoming a nurse.

WVU will soon honor Gross’compassion and commitment by presenting her with one of its highest awards for human outreach: the Mary Catherine Buswell Award for Outstanding Service to Women.

The assistant dean for student services in the School of Nursing will receive the award Friday, April 16, at a 7 p.m. ceremony in the Mountainlair Ballroom, as part of the University’s Weekend of Honors observances.

Buswell, the award’s namesake, was a WVU English professor and early proponent of women’s rights on campus and throughout the Morgantown community. She didn’t make a lot of noise but she did make her presence knownjust like Gross, said her friend and colleague, Dean of Nursing Dr. E. Jane Martin.

She is always dignified,Martin said of Gross,not an activist or radical, but clear in her support of our women students as she encourages them to be the best they can be.

Gross has been a nurse since 1956 and joined WVU as an assistant professor and charge nurse in 1978.

The veteran nursing professional, Martin said, always worked to give the best care to her patients, from her first days on the job as a staff nurse at on the maternity ward of a Pittsburgh, Pa., women’s hospital to the national papers she authored on relaxation therapy for breast cancer patients at WVU .

Gross earned degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas at Austin. Shes practiced nursing at hospitals across Pennsylvania and New York, as well as WVU Hospitals in Morgantown.