Mellany Aquino

Mellany Aquino is a pediatric nurse practitioner caring for children who will be having procedures that use anesthesia. To optimize individual safety and assess readiness for anesthesia, she gathers each patient's medical history and confers with anesthesiologists, surgeons and other providers. In addition, she educates patients and their families on general anesthesia and gives them their preoperative instructions.

Aquino earned a bachelor's degree in nursing at Grand Canyon University and her master's degree in nursing at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, part of Thomas Jefferson University. She began her career as a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit (ICU) in Oklahoma City. In 2012, she went to Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, where she was a bedside nurse in the pediatric cardiovascular ICU for eight years before joining UCSF.