Mariea Snell

Mariea Snell, DNP, APRN, FNP-C, is the associate professor of nursing and director of the Doctor of Nursing Practice programs at Maryville University. She currently serves as the vice president of the Missouri State Board of Nursing. In addition, she works as a family nurse practitioner at Maven Clinic Inc., where she diagnoses and treats common primary care conditions using telehealth. Before coming to Maryville, Dr. Snell worked as a family nurse practitioner program faculty member at Saint Louis University, where she instructed students on adult, pediatric, women’s, and geriatric health. Prior to that, she was a research nurse of infectious diseases at Washington University in St. Louis for four years before earning her FNP. At Washington University she managed all aspects of clinical research, including patient physical assessments, review of labs, monitoring of study treatments, protocol development, study startup, process and budget development, IRB submission, subject recruitment, informed consent process, study visit completion, CRF data entry, adverse event reporting, and study publication.

Snell didn’t always know that she would become a nurse. Although she had begun to launch a creative career in fashion design before college, Snell felt that the hands-on impact of the helping professions spoke to her. That underlying drive, along with a pathophysiology course in high school that spurred an interest in how the body’s systems function holistically, led her toward her true calling: nursing.

Although Snell’s experience at Washington University was a catalyst for much of her later work, her entire nursing career has been motivated, and brightened, by the individuals she’s served along the way. As a student attending births in the labor and delivery unit, the letters and baby pictures she received after the fact from happy new mothers told her she was on the right path.

“That level of gratitude and being able to make that impact on someone when they’re going through something really difficult . . . that reaffirms it for me every time, that this is exactly what I should be doing,” says Snell.

Now, Snell sees the direct effects of her work through her students as well as her patients. Her goal at Maryville, Snell explains, is to expand students’ horizons in terms of what they believe the nursing profession can include. Her experience at the HIV/AIDS clinical trials unit inspired her to do more to connect research with practice and to mentor other nurses to do so as well.

“It showed me that there’s so much more that can be done in this profession and so much more that we can add to the body of knowledge and the work that we do,” she says. “But to do that, I felt like I needed to get advanced degrees to be able to advance myself to that level.”

Snell’s master’s program afforded her more freedom as a nurse, allowing her to get licensed as an advanced practice nurse who is qualified to treat patients “at a similar level to a primary care physician.” Meanwhile, her doctorate encouraged her to think of health, and the potential impact of nursing, both systemically and globally — rather than solely at the individual level. This unique perspective is one she appreciates being able to share with her students in order to improve their own relationships with their patients and to expand their goals within their profession as a whole.

As in her early work as a designer, Snell brings creativity, flexibility, and a fresh approach to her work at Maryville. “I’ve loved how MVU has such a focus on tech and innovation,” she says. In fact, it was Snell’s work as a distance educator at Maryville that got her thinking about patient populations that might benefit from telehealth, which she now provides as a family nurse practitioner at Maven Clinic Inc.

Of the importance of telehealth, for which she even helped design the legislation in Missouri, Snell explains that some patients “don’t have a doctor in their area, they live in a rural county, or maybe they have anxiety and they don’t want to leave their house. This really helps decrease those barriers to care.”

From working persistently to decrease those barriers to care to ensuring that nurses in her state follow the guidelines that keep patients safe, Snell has transformed into a leader within the nursing field since her earliest calling to nurture others at vulnerable points in their lives. As vice president of the Missouri State Board of Nursing, for example, she ensures that patients get the same quality of nursing care that she’s developed throughout her time as a nurse. Across her career, Snell has brought empathy and compassion to her work, marrying clinical practice with academic research to ensure a better quality of life for her patients and a better education for her students.

• “Should Social Media Crack Down On Regional References To Covid Variants?,” Forbes
• “2021 Lemonaid Health Review: Is It Right for You?,” Healthline
• “Windex does not kill germs, so here’s how to disinfect glass,” Insider
• Snell, M., Barron, ML., Keotting. C., (2016). Detecting Trichomonas vaginalis in High-Risk Women: A Tricky Situation. The Journal for Nurse Practitioners, 271-276.
• Snell, M., Klebert, M., Hubert, S., Onen,N. (2016). A Novel Treatment for Onychomycosis in People Living With HIV Infection: Vicks VapoRub™ is Effective and Safe. Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 109-113.
• Onen, N., Overton, E., Seyfried, W., Stumm, E., & Snell, M. (2010). Aging and HIV Infection: A Comparison Between Older HIV-Infected Persons and the General Population. HIV Clinical Trials, 100-109.
• Vellozzi, C., Brooks, J., Bush, T., Conley, L., Henry, K., Carpenter, C., et al. (2009). The Study to Understand the Natural History of HIV and AIDS in the Era of Effective Therapy (SUN Study). American Journal of Epidemiology, 642-652.

• NURS 611: Advanced Pathophysiology
• NURS 612: Advanced Health Assessment
• NURS 623: Adult/Gerontology Health Care II
• NURS 624: Adult/Gerontology Nursing Practitioner Practicum II
• NURS 629: Pediatric/Family Health Care
• NURS 630: Pediatric/Family Nurse Practitioner Practicum
• NURS 701: Foundations of Clinical Scholarship
• NURS 705: Clinical Inquiry I
• NURS 706: Clinical Inquiry II
• NURS 707: Clinical Inquiry III

• Healthcare
• Nursing
• Nursing education
• Nursing regulation
• Telehealth
• Clinical research
  • Infectious disease research
  • HIV
• Public health
• Women’s health
• Sexually transmitted infection
• Health education
• Pediatrics

Phone: 314-529-9450

Email: msnell@maryville.edu