The Research Room

Lynn Chen, PhD, assistant professor, always felt her first language was “numbers,” so statistics have always come easy for her. But nursing was never on her radar. She pursued a doctoral degree in educational psychology with a specialization in quantitative methods, which involves a lot of statistics. As a doctoral student, she began working on the research project HIV Testing Rates and Testing Locations by Race and Ethnicity for the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) School of Social Work. Later, Chen served as a research assistant in a nursing research lab, a teaching assistant for a statistics course, and a data collector for student evaluations at UT’s School of Nursing. In 2011, Chen accepted an evaluator position with the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Currently, she is working on the research project Preparation of Innovative RN-to-BSN Nursing Workforce with Expertise in Care Coordination Supported by Health Information Technology and Analytics with Eun-Shim Nahm, PhD ’03, RN, FAAN, professor and specialty director, Nursing Informatics. Although Chen doesn’t have a background in nursing, her expertise in data collection and analysis has contributed to cutting-edge research projects that are instrumental in delivering high-quality health care to patients.