I'm Jenni Ross Majumdar, PhD, MSN, CRNA. For the most vulnerable hour of a patient's life — the hour they won't remember — I'm the person keeping them safe. I've spent my career trying to make that hour, and the people who deliver it, visible.
I'm a Nurse Scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where I've practiced as a nurse anesthetist since 2015 and led research since 2022. I'm a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, City University of New York, where I serve as Assistant Specialty Director of the Nurse Anesthesia Adult Gerontology Acute Care DNP program. And I'm the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Nurse Anesthesia Education, my field's peer-reviewed education journal.
The path here
I started as an emergency department tech in Spokane, Washington, while earning my BSN at Washington State University, then worked as an ER and ICU nurse at Providence Holy Family Hospital. Critical care taught me what I wanted: the specialty where the nurse holds the airway. I earned my Master of Science in Nurse Anesthesia at Boston College, and in 2015 joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as a CRNA.
Practice kept raising questions that practice alone couldn't answer — why some patients sail through recovery while others struggle, what preoperative anxiety actually does to outcomes, who gets listened to in the perioperative pathway. So I pursued a PhD in Nursing at The Catholic University of America, finishing in 2022, the same year I was appointed Nurse Scientist at MSK and joined the Hunter-Bellevue faculty.
The research
My research program spans perioperative anxiety, distress, and recovery in patients undergoing cancer surgery and their caregivers; nurse anesthesia education and curriculum design; safety and drug-diversion prevention in clinical training; and the U.S. nurse anesthesia workforce. I've published more than twenty-seven peer-reviewed articles — first author on most — in journals including Oncology Nursing Forum, the AANA Journal, the Journal of Nursing Regulation, Supportive Care in Cancer, and the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia, with funding from the NIH (through a Weill Cornell sub-award), the Rudin Foundation, the Leslie B. Tyson Nursing Research Award, and others.
The writing
In late 2025 I started Art of Anesthesia, a Substack publication for general readers about what actually happens in the operating room. It grew from a simple observation: fifty million Americans go under general anesthesia every year, and almost nobody has ever explained it to them clearly. The publication now reaches more than a thousand readers with some of the highest engagement rates on the platform's health vertical — clinical explainers, honest commentary on how television portrays (and erases) nurses, and reporting on the workforce that delivers anesthesia in America.
Recognition and service
I'm a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine (2024) and a 2025–2026 Women in Power Fellow at 92NY. I serve as an inaugural member of the AANA Membership Committee and the AANA Educator Podcast Steering Committee, an elected Faculty Senator at Hunter College, a member of the MSK Institutional Review Board, and Section Editor for Biochemistry of Elsevier's Chemistry and Physics for Nurse Anesthesia. I chair the Educational Program Committee of the New York State Association of Nurse Anesthetists.
Why "the hidden work"?
Most of what keeps patients safe is invisible by design — the monitoring you never feel, the adjustments you never see, the profession most people couldn't name. Invisible work is easy to undervalue, underfund, and erase. Everything I do — the research, the teaching, the journal, the newsletter — is a version of the same project: showing the work, so the people who do it count.