Penn’s School of Nursing recently announced its 2025-26 cohort of Conway Scholars.
The cohort marks the third year of Penn’s partnership with the Bedford Falls Foundation-DAF, which initially made a $1 million donation to the school in 2023 to be used over a four-year period, an amount it has since doubled. This year’s cohort consists of 16 students from across the country who will each receive a scholarship to support them as they pursue their Master of Professional Nursing degree at Penn.
“Penn Nursing is solving vital challenges together—and our partnership with the Bedford Falls Foundation is a vital part of what we do,” Penn Nursing Dean Antonia Villarruel wrote in the announcement.
The MPN program is a four-semester, 15-month, full-time program that helps nurses gain a variety of skills necessary for the field. It was established in 2023 and is intended to help students who hold a bachelor’s degree in another field enter the health sector.
“Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system,” William Conway Jr., the foundation’s creator, wrote in the announcement. “At Bedford Falls Foundation, our principal mission is to facilitate greater access to high-quality nursing education by easing the financial burden, so they can better take care of us and the communities they serve.”
Conway and his wife, Joanne Barkett Conway, created the Bedford Falls Foundation in 1997 and expanded it with a donor-advised fund in 2020. The foundation’s mission is to address the nursing workforce shortage by providing support for candidates to receive a high-quality education at universities across the nation. Its annual investment in nursing has grown from $5.2 million in 2013 to over $59 million in 2025.
“The foundation’s investment that created the Conway Scholars program at Penn Nursing brings new voices and visions into the nursing workforce,” Villarruel wrote. “More than that, it pushes nursing to the very edge of what is possible.”
When the inaugural class was announced, Villarruel emphasized the significance of the partnership in preparing students to “uniquely to advance health in whatever setting they choose to practice.”
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Past Conway Scholars have noted the program’s influence on their training. 2024 Nursing graduate Christian Knox explained that being selected for the program allowed him “to focus more on what is most important, which is learning how to provide the best patient care,” in an interview with Penn Giving.
