From Goldman Sachs to Chief Nurse: A Nurse Spotlight on Paul Coyne (Podcast)
The Love n’ Leary Nursing Podcast launched its first Nurse Spotlight episode with someone who has quietly reshaped how the profession sees itself. Hosts Marion Leary, PhD, MPH, RN and Rebecca Love, RN, MSN, FIEL welcomed Paul Coyne to share a story that is hard to believe until you hear it in his own words.
Paul is a nurse, a nurse practitioner, an entrepreneur, a healthcare executive, and a poet. But his path started somewhere most nurses don’t — in a hospital bed at 15 with a diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and then in a rehab unit at 22 after a stroke in his left thalamus that left him unable to walk or talk.
Paul graduated college with a job offer to work at Goldman Sachs as an interest rate derivatives analyst. A week later, he had his stroke. He moved to New York anyway. He learned to speak again while trading derivatives. His colleagues thought he was a shy trader — they didn’t know his brain was still coming back online.
Three years in, during a routine corporate physical, he caught his reflection in a mirror. He was wearing scrubs. He suddenly knew what he was supposed to do.
“It was a very sudden experience of just like this is what I’m supposed to do.”
He called his parents that night. He enrolled at Columbia’s accelerated bachelor’s in nursing. Over the next three and a half years, he stacked six degrees — a BSN, a master’s, and a doctorate at Columbia, plus an MBA and a Master of Science in Finance at Northeastern on nights and weekends.
Paul was clear that he doesn’t recommend this pace to anyone. He wasn’t chasing letters. He was chasing proof that his brain was back.
“When your brain is not fully there and then it comes back, you always wonder, like, am I back? School for me was one way to prove to myself that it was back.”
Paul became the chief nurse executive at the Hospital for Special Surgery at 35, believed to be one of the youngest to lead a hospital system of that size in the country. He led 2,000 people across four states — pharmacy, lab, nursing, patient care services — at the number-one orthopedic hospital in the world.
He didn’t get there through titles alone. During the pandemic, he was leading infection prevention and occupational health at HSS. He and a colleague in her 60s split night shifts on-call for six months, answering phone calls from staff who were scared. When the CNE role opened up, people said what they remembered most was that he cared.
His signature leadership practice as chief nurse was simple. Once a day, he called a random staff member into his office for 30 minutes. Just to talk. He tried to remember one meaningful thing about each person — not their favorite color, but that their son was sick or their mother was in the hospital. Then he’d remember it the next time he saw them in the hallway.
“Nurses are a profession that wants something that’s real and they can spot fake stuff.”
Augie and the Company He Built at Night
While working in analytics at New York Presbyterian, Paul co-founded a company with two others to build a computer vision system for hospitals and senior living facilities. They called the device Augie, because they believed technology should augment the care team, not replace it. That was before the AI chatbot boom made the argument obvious.
The device is now on the walls of hundreds of facilities across the country. It helps prevent patient falls. It helps nurses care for their patients.
Paul built it on nights and weekends after his MBA courses ended. He said he learned something bigger from that experience than the business itself: it was all possible.
There’s another side of Paul that surprises people. He has written two books of poetry. The first started with four lines that came to him in a dream while his wife was pregnant with their first son. He was worried his heart disease might mean he wouldn’t be there to teach his children the lessons he wanted them to know. So he wrote 100 lessons in verse.
The second book is about how it feels to be him — which he says is really about how it feels to be everyone. People from every background have told him his poems captured something they thought was theirs alone.
“There’s a couple poems in there that talk about the first time I talked about having a heart disease. And every time people read those poems, if they’re in the LGBT community, they tell me, ‘That’s how it feels to come out.'”
One story from the episode stuck with Marion and Rebecca. The day before recording, Paul got a text from an unknown number. He almost deleted it. Google reverse search turned up a name he hadn’t spoken to in three years — a former staff member from HSS. Her 10-month-old son had leukemia. She was in the hospital. She remembered Paul had cared about her, so she reached out.
Paul emailed the chief nurse at her son’s hospital that same day.
An hour before that text arrived, Paul had been telling his psychologist that what he missed most about being chief nurse was the platform to help people. He said the text felt like an answer.
Marion and Rebecca asked Paul what he wanted to leave with the audience. His answer was for every nurse who thinks they haven’t done much.
“Nurses are so good that they’re doing all the things that are possible but perhaps not saying it because they think, ‘Oh well, that’s just what I do.’ Meanwhile, people who are doing less meaningful things are talking about it over and over. Nurses are like, ‘What did I do?’ You did so much you can’t even remember all the things you did.”
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Published on
July 13, 2026
Written by
Nurse.org Staff
