Dr. Karen Dunn Lopez is an Associate Professor at the College of Nursing and the Director of Research for the Center for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness at the College of Nursing at The University of Iowa, U.S. In her program of research, she focuses on identifying factors that can improve the usability and usefulness of clinical documentation and health information technologies with the overarching goals of improving decision making and health outcomes. Within Dr. Dunn Lopez’s program of research, many of the technologies are grounded in the use of nursing standardized terminologies to make nursing care more visible. She uses a wide range of methods including human factors engineering, human centered design approaches, systematic review methods and secondary analysis of electronic health records. Her current work focuses on tailoring technologies to individual characteristics to facilitate rapid cognition of complex health data. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of health in the US with recent grant focusing a clinical decision support for nurses. She has authored and co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and has been cited more than 1700 times. She is past chair of the American Medical Informatics Association, Nursing Informatics Working Group, and a Governing Director of the Alliance for Nursing Informatics.