James Thomas believes leadership is about service, not status. For him, the most meaningful key performance indicator is how many people he’s helping. By that measure and many others, his success as a health care executive, nurse, instructor, advocate, mentor, volunteer, community leader and foster parent is off the charts.

Currently director of nursing at Main Line Health Riddle Hospital in Media, Pennsylvania, Thomas has spent more than a decade in high-acuity hospital settings, and he says Drexel’s master’s in Nursing Leadership in Health Systems Management program prepared him to take on greater responsibility and impact. Just two years after completing the program, he took the helm as nurse manager of the emergency department at Nemours Children’s Hospital — a unit responsible for treating more than 60,000 children a year. The department earned national recognition under his leadership, receiving the prestigious Lantern Award from the Emergency Nurses Association not once, but twice. In his current role, he provides leadership for the Main Line Health Riddle Hospital nursing workforce with over 600 reports and oversees operations across all inpatient beds as well as the emergency department, intensive care unit, labor and delivery, and neonatal ICU. In addition to his hospital work, Thomas gives back to many professional nursing organizations locally and nationally and serves as an adjunct instructor and project advisor in the Doctor of Nursing Practice program at Wilmington University. For all that, he says, his most transformative role is the one he plays at home. He and his spouse are a licensed foster family who have supported multiple children during their most vulnerable moments. They are also the proud parents of four children, one of whom joined their family through adoption. “These personal experiences fuel my advocacy for trauma-informed care, child welfare reform and equitable health care access,” Thomas says. “It’s one thing to manage health care operations on paper, but it’s another to know, personally, how policy impacts real families like mine.”