When Leorey Saligan began writing his dissertation on how an inflammatory disease called sarcoidosis harms quality of life, he would have bet everything that patients felt worst about difficulty breathing or the threat of blindness.
His certainty, however, proved wildly misplaced. The top patient complaint, by far, was continual exhaustion.
“My patients were saying, ‘I don’t have energy. I can’t go out. I can’t perform my job,’” Saligan said. “They were just so fatigued.”
Saligan’s shock at how exhausted patients were, and how much that exhaustion trumped all other drawbacks of the medical condition, inspired the path of research that has now earned Saligan, the inaugural vice dean of research and a professor at the Rutgers School of Nursing, a spot in the International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame.
Saligan is also a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Rutgers Cancer Institute, the state’s only NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, together with RWJBarnabas Health.
The Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing presents the honor every year to recognize nurse researchers whose work has achieved sustained international recognition and shaped both the profession and the patients it serves.
Saligan, the only medical professional in his family, came to the United States from the Philippines about 40 years ago, arriving at age 21 with degrees in medical technology and nursing but without friends, family or any professional network. He worked first as a nurse aide in a nursing home, then as an intensive care unit nurse, and eventually as a family nurse practitioner.
He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in nursing from Hampton University in Virginia. He then joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2006, where he spent nearly 20 years as an investigator at the National Institute of Nursing Research.
Shortly after he joined the NIH, the institute sought nurse scientists to develop symptom-focused research programs and asked Saligan what he might want to study. He took a risk and asked to build a program focused specifically on fatigue that lasts after medical treatment.
“Fatigue wasn’t seen as a glamorous topic. Who wants to know about fatigue?” Saligan said. “People get tired even hearing the word, and it’s a symptom of nearly every condition. But it’s vital to patient quality of life, so I had to find a way to make it exciting.”
Saligan’s pitch excited NIH officials enough for him to get his lab, and he turned to cancer patients, who offered a natural model for studying how fatigue develops and persists. Most arrive for treatment without significant fatigue. Nearly all of them develop it after treatment, however, and then their trajectories inexplicably diverge.
In one of Saligan’s studies of men with nonmetastatic prostate cancer receiving radiation, 40% continued to experience clinically significant fatigue one to two years after completing therapy, while the others had recovered the energy they had before treatment.
Where other researchers focused on demographic and social predictors, Saligan went to the lab. Using genomics and proteomics, he identified specific genes and proteins associated with persistent fatigue, including a glutamate receptor that pointed to ketamine as a potential intervention. A subsequent study demonstrated that ketamine could rapidly reduce cancer-related fatigue. A third landmark paper defined the multidimensional phenotype of cancer-related fatigue – encompassing physical, cognitive, affective and motivational components – work he said could inform future diagnostic criteria.
Saligan draws a sharp distinction between the nursing science perspective and the medical one.
“We are a caring model compared to a curing paradigm,” he said. “Nursing is concerned with getting your quality of life back to what it was before any disease began.”
His research starts with patient reports and works backward to the biology. That philosophy extends to his current work using noninvasive MRI to measure mitochondrial function in the skeletal muscle of cancer survivors, seeking objective biomarkers for a symptom that has long been assessed only through questionnaires.
Saligan joined Rutgers as an adjunct professor in September 2025 and was named the inaugural vice dean of research at the School of Nursing in February 2026.
“This appointment celebrates the strength and momentum of research at Rutgers School of Nursing,” said Angela Starkweather, the school’s dean and a professor.
The Hall of Fame induction carries particular meaning for Saligan because he came to the country as an adult with nothing but a degree.
“It is such a testament of opportunities that are available for immigrants like me,” said Saligan, who added that the main explanation for his success has been “persistence and resilience. I just don’t back down.”
