I'm Jenni Ross Majumdar, PhD, CRNA. When a patient is at their most vulnerable — unconscious, and unlikely to remember any of it — I'm the person keeping them safe. I've spent my career making that work, and the people who do it, easier to understand.
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: to be the one at the head of the bed, managing the airway and the anesthetic. 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 out of something simple: fifty million Americans have general anesthesia every year, and people are endlessly curious about what happens when they go under. I love answering — that's the whole publication. The publication grew past a thousand subscribers in its first six months — clinical explainers, honest commentary on how television portrays nurses (and what it gets wrong), 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 on national AANA committees — including as an inaugural member of its Educator Podcast Steering and Membership committees — chair the Educational Program Committee of the New York State Association of Nurse Anesthetists, and sit on Hunter College's Faculty Senate and Memorial Sloan Kettering's Institutional Review Board. On the editorial side, beyond the Journal of Nurse Anesthesia Education I'm Section Editor for Biochemistry of Elsevier's Chemistry and Physics for Nurse Anesthesia, serve on the early-career editorial board of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Oncology Nursing, review for a range of nursing and anesthesia journals, and mentor early-career authors.
The through-line
Most of what keeps patients safe during anesthesia goes unseen — the monitoring, the constant small adjustments, the expertise most people never think to look for. My research, teaching, editing, and writing all work toward the same thing: making that work — and the people who do it — a little better understood.