Before coming to Arkansas in 1973, Dr. Hartwig taught in nursing programs in Kenya, East Africa, and Liberia, West Africa, and has maintained a great interest in international nursing issues. Her teaching career also encompassed teaching in diploma, ASN, BSN, MSN, and PhD nursing programs in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Arkansas. 

In 1973 she came to Arkansas State University (ASU) in Jonesboro as an assistant professor of Nursing, and co-founded the ASU BSN degree program. She rose through the ranks at ASU to full professor, serving as director of the BSN Program, faculty member and later director of the graduate program, and chair of the Department of Nursing. She was selected in 2009 as one of “The First 100” – one hundred former ASU faculty members who had made significant contributions to ASU during its first century.

She earned her PhD in Nursing from UTHSC in 1993, and three years later spent a year as a Post-Doctoral Kellogg Fellow at UTHSC, earning her nurse practitioner certification in the process. In 1997 she accepted a position as nurse practitioner, director of Nursing Education, and faculty member in the Family Medicine Residency program at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences AHEC-Northeast center in Jonesboro, with a concurrent faculty post at the UAMS College of Nursing.

In her multiple roles at AHEC, Mary taught many residents about the realities of family practice medicine, especially relating to diabetes and conducting clinical research. Her faculty responsibilities included primary care for her case load of patients in the AHEC Clinic and diabetes care clinics for patients referred to her. She became one of the most recognized regional experts in diabetes, wrote grants for clinical research, led annual research projects, and taught Advanced Physiology and Pathophysiology via compressed video for UAMS College of Nursing graduate students. In the decade before her retirement, she chaired the AHEC multidisciplinary research committee, and oversaw the development of national poster presentations of their annual clinical research projects that were presented at the national meetings of the Society for the Teaching of Family Medicine. Her teaching of nursing and medical students was recognized by the UAMS Chancellor’s Teaching Award for 2009-10.

Professional and community service were important parts of her faculty role. She served on the St. Bernards Medical Center Institutional Review Board for a decade, including eight years of that time as its chair, and provided care to patients weekly at the Jonesboro Church Health Center, a clinic for the medically underserved and uninsured that serves all of northeast Arkansas. She earned credentials as a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) and facilitated the preparation of other SANEs in Northeast Arkansas by obtaining a UAMS grant through the Violence Against Women Act. She was appointed by two successive Arkansas governors to a state-wide commission on child abuse, rape, and domestic violence. She extended that expertise to serving on the board of the Women’s Crisis Center (now Family Crisis Center) of Northeast Arkansas for ten years before her retirement.

She retired in December 2012, receiving emeritus faculty status at UAMS in May 2013. Since then she has enjoyed reading, serving as liturgist in her United Methodist Church, and traveling with her husband, Dr. Charles Hartwig. Favorite destinations are the various assigned posts of their children, Markus Hartwig and Karin Gleisner, and their families.