Laurie Duckworth is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida, College of Nursing. She holds a joint appointment at UF Health as the Director of Nursing Research. Laurie has 39 years of professional nursing experience including practice in critical care, pharmacogenetics, pulmonology, hematology, and clinical drug trials.

For the past 30 years, Dr. Duckworth has managed care for children and adults with asthma. She helped design research protocols to measure exhaled nitric oxide as an indicator of airway inflammation. Her normative values in children were adopted by the American Thoracic Society. Her research focus includes identifying patients with sickle cell disease who have co-morbid diagnosis of asthma, putting them at risk for acute chest syndrome; a leading cause of mortality. Her contributions have led to an Integrated Pediatric Sickle Cell Disease and Pulmonary Care Clinic model for patients with sickle cell disease and asthma in north and central Florida, with recent adoption of the model in Rochester, New York. She is collaborating with healthcare teams in Nigeria and Ghana.

She earned her PhD degree and MSN degree from the University of Florida and her BSN degree from Florida State University. She is a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner.