Karen Dunn Lopez is the Director of Research for the Center for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness. Her scholarship focuses on nursing informatics. She has authored and co-authored over 35 peer-reviewed articles and has been cited more than 750 times. Using a wide range of methods including human factors engineering, human centered design approaches, and systematic review methods, her program of research focuses on identifying factors that can improve the usability and usefulness of health information technologies with the overarching goals of improving decision making and health outcomes. Her current work focuses on tailoring technologies to individual characteristics in order to facilitate rapid cognition of complex health data. Within Dr. Dunn Lopez’s program of research, many of the technologies are grounded in the use of nursing standardized terminologies to generate new knowledge. To date this research involves novel applications of NANDA-I (Nursing Diagnosis), NIC (Nursing Intervention Classification) and NOC (Nursing Outcome Classification) to develop clinical decision support technologies, and is supported by three federally-funded grants. In addition, as part of her program of research, Dr. Dunn Lopez led the first systematic review of clinical decision support that targets decision making by acute care nurses. She found that although technologies designed to support nurse decision making has lagged behind medical decision supports, that decision support designed to support nurse decision making is associated with improved patient outcomes. She also co-led a project to develop and test an algorithm to determine the differences between nurse and physician use of terminologies that provided quantitative evidence of the differences between nurse and physician care.