Dr. Karen Dunn Lopez is a nationally and internationally recognized nursing informatics researcher, leader and educator. She is a Professor at the University of Iowa College of Nursing, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness. Dr. Dunn Lopez leads a robust, multidisciplinary program of research focused on advancing the design, implementation, and evaluation of health information technologies. Her research, funded by NINR, NCI, AHRQ and ARPA-H spans a wide range of methodologies, including human factors engineering, human-centered design, data science, simulation trials, and systematic reviews. 

Her research has two core aims: 

1. Improving the usability and usefulness of health information technologies for nurses and other clinicians.
2. Leveraging nurse-generated documentation data—often underutilized—to demonstrate the unique contributions of nurses to patient outcomes within multi-professional care teams. 

Her scientific contributions fall into three main areas: 

• The design and testing of usable and useful nurse-centric clinical decision support systems (CDSS)
• The use of nurse-generated care data to demonstrate the value of nursing in improving patient outcomes
• Establishing links between CDSS and improved patient outcomes, particularly in nursing decision-making contexts 

Dr. Dunn Lopez has authored or co-authored more than 70 peer-reviewed publications, which have been cited over 2,700 times. A hallmark of her work is the innovative use of standardized nursing terminologies—including NANDA-I (Nursing Diagnoses), NIC (Nursing Interventions Classification), and NOC (Nursing Outcomes Classification)—to support clinical decision-making and generate new knowledge about the value of nursing care.

Curriculum Vitae