Earning a Bachelor of Science in nursing from Viterbo University in 1995, Theresa A. Nutt, MA, BSN, began her career as a registered nurse. As a hospital nurse, she remembers seeing patients come back again and again with the same symptoms, meaning that the patients needed more care than just what they were getting in the hospital. This led her down alternative health care routes concerning stress management, integrative modalities and coaching. In 2003, she obtained a certificate in personal and life coaching from Coach U, Inc., which she followed with a Master of Arts in human development with a focus on corporate coaching and training at St. Mary’s University in 2005. Ms. Nutt is also board certified in holistic nursing through the American Holistic Nurses Association and in health and wellness coaching through the National Board of Medical Examiners.
In 2006, Ms. Nutt joined Clarian Health Systems, now Indiana University Health, as a wellness coach and rose to become a manager of wellness coaches in 2007. From there, she served as a registered nurse at Hillview Health Care Center from 2008 to 2009. Coming to Gundersen Health System in 2009, she was the manager of CSO, ARCC and the hospital float pool until 2010 and the system level project manager until 2013. After serving as a holistic nurse clinician at HealthEast from 2013 to 2015, Ms. Nutt entered the field of academia as graduate faculty at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, a role she held until 2022. During this time, Ms. Nutt also served as the co-director of the integrative health and wellbeing coaching program at the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing from 2019 to 2022.
Since 2021, Ms. Nutt has been an education consultant with the University of California Irvine, a role she assumed after being asked to help the university build its health coaching curriculum and teach its first cohort. Following her departure from the University of Minnesota, she joined UC Irvine in a full-time position as the director of health and wellness coaching at the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute. Today, she brings her expertise in integrative health and nursing, coaching, academics and inpatient and outpatient care to her duties overseeing UC Irvine’s health coaching program, where she does work speaking, developing, teaching, researching, recruiting, seeing patients and marketing.
As a consultant and clinician, Ms. Nutt continues to see patients and develop and contribute to numerous innovative projects. Since 2015, she has served as a transformational coach with Your Deeper Calling and has been a consultant and subject matter expert for the Whole Health project of the United States Department of Veteran Affairs since 2020. She has further contributed her skills to the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching and Pathways Minneapolis and spent time as a nurse coach for Neighborhood Naturopathic LLC between 2019 and 2020. In order to remain up to date with developments in her field, Ms. Nutt maintains professional affiliation with a number of organizations in her field, including the American Holistic Nurses Association and the International Coach Federation, where she spent time as a member of the board for the Minnesota charter chapter.
Attributing much of her success to her curiosity combined with her desire to help patients and their loved ones, Ms. Nutt considers her greatest achievements to be her more than 20-year career in the field of integrative health care and her work as a trailblazer in academic health and wellness programming. She feels strongly about creating options for integrative health care to give people an expanded set of tools for their healing journeys. As she plans for the future, Ms. Nutt is currently looking for the ideal doctoral program that will allow her to combine system-level and leadership thinking with health care, coaching and integrative medicine, as well as to collaborate on innovative research projects with physicians and other health care professionals.