Dr. Parajuli is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and an affiliate faculty member in the Gerontology Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She earned her master’s degree in Gerontology from Miami University in Ohio and her PhD in Nursing from Pennsylvania State University.

Her primary areas of research and expertise include aging and gerontology, geriatric oncology, and palliative care. Her current program of research focuses on reducing barriers to and improving access to palliative care for older adults with cancer and their family caregivers.

She recently received two grants to support this work:

• an R15 grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to develop and validate a palliative care readiness tool for older adults with cancer, and
• the Sigma/HPNF End-of-Life Nursing Care Research Grant to develop and validate a similar tool for family caregivers of older adults with cancer.

Dr. Parajuli has received multiple awards for her research, including the 2025 Southern Nursing Research Society (SNRS) Aging/Gerontology Research Interest and Implementation Group (RIIG) Rising Investigator Award, the 2025 Hospice and Palliative Nurses Foundation (HPNF) Emerging Leaders Award, and the 2024 Faculty Excellence Award in Research from the Gamma Iota Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau. She has also been nominated for the Faculty Excellence Award in Research by the College of Health and Human Services at UNC Charlotte in 2022, 2023, and 2025.