Ernest J. Grant

In 2018, the American Nurses Association elected Ernest J. Grant its 36th president, the first man to hold the office in the organization's history. He had reached that post through three decades of bedside work few of his colleagues had done: the care of burned patients.

Grant moved to Chapel Hill in the early 1980s and went to work at the North Carolina Jaycee Burn Center at UNC Hospitals, starting as a licensed practical nurse on a medical-surgical unit before joining the burn center, where he found the work that became his vocation. He went on to spend 36 years at the burn center, rising from staff nursing into outreach education and eventually directing its internationally recognized Burn Prevention Program. He trained emergency-care staff and paramedics who prepared patients for transfer, and worked with schools and fire-service partners on burn prevention. His account connects bedside experience with teaching people beyond the hospital. In interviews, he has also spoken about caring for burn patients who rejected him because of his race, and about continuing to give them the care they needed.

His education included a nursing bachelor's degree at North Carolina Central University and master's and doctoral degrees at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He served as an adjunct professor at the UNC School of Nursing and led the North Carolina Nurses Association as its first African American male president, elected in 2010.

At the American Nurses Association, he served two terms as president, advocating for nurses through the COVID-19 pandemic, and completed his second and final term in 2022. In July 2026, the American Academy of Nursing named him a Living Legend, recognizing his contributions to nursing leadership, burn care and public health.

Grant was born on October 6, 1958, in Swannanoa, North Carolina, a small rural town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the youngest of seven children. His father died when he was five, and money for his education was short. A high school guidance counselor steered him into a licensed practical nursing program at Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College, which he began in 1976, and he may have been the first African American male to graduate from the program.

Prevention became his mission after his first months on the burn unit showed him how preventable most burn injuries are. He lobbied the North Carolina legislature for stricter fireworks laws and for a law requiring that water heaters be preset to 120 degrees to prevent scalds, led the effort that passed the Fire-Safe Cigarette Act in 2007, and helped design safety programs for children and senior citizens. After September 11, 2001, he volunteered for ten days of twelve-hour night shifts at the burn center at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center, caring for patients injured in the World Trade Center attacks, work for which he received a 2001 Nurse of the Year Award from President George W. Bush.