GREENSBORO (July 23, 2021) – She is “that nurse” – the nurse with the sleeve of tattoos screening patients for COVID-19 outside UNC Hospitals whose photo went viral in March 2020.

She is also Grace Cindric, a 2016 graduate of UNC Greensboro’s School of Nursing.

And she is “one of our alums – a nurse going to work – but she looked like she was going to war,” UNCG Chancellor Franklin Gilliam says in the accompanying video.

“I mean, she looked like she was, ‘Hey, I’m going into the teeth of this thing, I’m coming here to fight,’” Gilliam says. “I thought that just personified the kind of mettle that nurses have and that certainly our alums displayed.”

Cindric’s image took on some slightly less-polite labels in memes created after it circulated so widely. Gilliam thinks the image will be burned into our memories 10, 20, or 25 years from now as we recall the coronavirus pandemic.

“It speaks to the seriousness of this pandemic,” he says. “It was a war – it was a health war against this virus.

“But it also speaks to the fact that there are a lot of brave people who were willing to risk it to go in and fight it on our behalf.”