Research Faculty

Researcher publications can be found on their individual Departmental Pages, or by searching via Author Name or Keyword at PubMed or Science Direct.

Marion M Bendixen

Marion M Bendixen PhD, MSN, RN, IBCLC

Assistant Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Bendixen ‘s translational research focuses on the clinically and scientifically important topic of infant nutrition and human milk components. This area intersects maternal/infant healthcare with the biological and physiological mechanisms of insufficient mothers’ own milk (MOM) volume among mothers who deliver an infant(s) admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

Ragnhildur Bjarnadottir

Ragnhildur Bjarnadottir PhD, MPH

Assistant Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Bjarnadottir’s area of expertise is Nursing Informatics, Data Science, Clinical Decision Support, Quality of Care, Underserved Populations.

Leveraging health informatics and data science to improve health care quality for underserved populations. Dissertation research examined home care nurses’ assessment and documentation of patients’ sexual orientation and gender identity. Has also explored EHR implementation and nurses experiences with documentation systems in the long-term care setting. In current research, uses text-mining methods to identify factors associated with risk of patient falls in acute care nurses’ progress notes.

Staja Booker

Staja Booker PhD, RN, FAAN

Assistant Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Booker’s areas of expertise are aging, pain assessment and management, pain disparities and health equity.

Jane M Carrington

Jane M Carrington PhD, RN, FAAN, FAMIA

Associate Professor, Dorothy M. Smith Endowed Chair And Director Of Florida Blue Center For Healthcare Quality
Research Summary:

Dr. Carrington’s areas of expertise include Informatics, electronic health record, human factors, and communication.

Hwayoung Cho

Hwayoung Cho PhD, RN

Assistant Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Cho’s areas of expertise are nursing informatics – implementation science using user-centered design and rigorous usability evaluations (including both quantitative/qualitative approaches, such as an innovative eye-tracking method, a card sorting technique, a heuristic evaluation, a cognitive walk-through, think-aloud protocols, focus groups and in-depth interviews) and data science leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) with large-scale real-world data from EHRs and claims data Her seminal research contributions include developing, testing, and implementing mobile health applications to support symptom management for people with HIV (PWH) in their everyday life and clinical decision support tools integrated with electronic health records (EHRs) to support optimal decision-making processes and reduce cognitive burden for clinicians in practice.

Lakeshia Cousin

Lakeshia Cousin PhD, APRN, AGPCNP-BC

Assistant Professor; Assistant Director of Community Outreach & Engagement, UF Health Cancer Center
Research Summary:

Dr. Cousin’s areas of expertise are cancer prevention and survivorship, cardiovascular health, psychosocial care, and health disparities research.

Jennifer R Dungan

Jennifer R Dungan PhD, MSN, BSN

Associate Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Dungan’s primary area of scientific expertise is in the use of genetic epidemiology approaches to the study of complex cardiovascular diseases and outcomes. Specific areas of expertise involve: candidate gene and genome-wide association studies of large cardiovascular genetics datasets; and, survival-, age- and sex-associated analyses involving genetic predictors. Dr. Dungan is also interested in collaborating on projects related to women’s heart disease, functional genetic studies of coronary disease candidate genes, and clinical and genetic biorepositories.

Miriam O Ezenwa

Miriam O Ezenwa PhD, MSN, BSN, RN, FAAN

Professor
Research Summary:

Health disparities in pain management, particularly, healthcare injustice, a psychological stressor, as an explanatory factor for the disparities; pain and symptom management for people with sickle cell disease or cancer; palliative care for end-of-life cancer patients; biobehavioral research including cortisol as a biomarker of stress and use of computer technologies for stress and pain measurement, and delivery of stress reduction intervention in sickle cell disease.

Dany Fanfan

Dany Fanfan PhD, MSN, RN

Assistant Professor
Research Summary:

Expertise in ethnic-minority immigrant health disparities research, mental health/well-being, distress symptoms, immigration-related stress/stressors

Ann L Horgas

Ann L Horgas PhD, RN, FGSA, FAAN

Executive Associate Dean and Interim Chair, BNS and FCH Departments
Research Summary:

Pain and aging; pain management in persons with dementia, predictors of persistent post-surgical pain; and pain at end of life.

Gail Keenan

Gail Keenan PhD, RN, FAAN

R. Murray And Annabel Davis Jenks Endowed Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Keenan’s innovative research focuses on capturing standardized nursing and clinical data for improving the planning, delivery, cost and health outcomes of nursing care across the continuum. She has developed HANDS, the “Hands-on Automated Nursing Data System”, that provides rich data that represents nursing care provision, measures care impact and supports care planning over time.

Dr. Keenan’s research priorities include:

1. Continuously refining and expanding a simple universal automated method for collecting a “Big Picture” standardized clinical data set (HANDS) for the multiple purposes of:

— Providing a current and historical summary of care wherever the patient presents that is always in the same format and utilizes standardized terminologies

— Supporting day to day communication and handoffs (SHARER) of members of the patient’s care team within and across settings

— Connecting universally to all EHRs

— Generating standardized data for use in evaluating care, identifying and disseminating best practices, and benchmarking across systems

2. Building and continuously improving methods of analyzing standardized data captured in HANDS and translating this into meaningful and immediately useful decision support at the point of care.

3. Demonstrating the impact of the HANDS “Big Picture” method on reducing the cost of care for chronically ill patients (sickle cell, cardiac, eol and others)

4. Demonstrating the value of HANDS data in identifying nurse training and competency needs as well as providing rationale for appropriate staffing

5. Enabling wide scale diffusion of HANDS into education/practice

She is currently involved in the following research activities:

Dr. Keenan’s research focuses on developing and refining a feasible automated methodology for collecting a standardized clinical data set for the purpose of improving the planning, delivery, cost and health outcomes of nursing care across the continuum. She is currently involved in the following research activities:

HANDS Research Project Refinement of a web based software and method for nurses to document their patient care in the electronic health record and communicate with other members of the interdisciplinary team. The Hands-on Automated Nursing Data System (HANDS) is a standardized plan of care method in which the patient’s plan is updated at every nurse hand-off allowing the interdisciplinary team to track the story about care and progress toward desired outcomes in a standardized format across time and units. The HANDS Method includes a standardized interface, database, rules of data entry and rules for use of the plan in hand-offs and in interdisciplinary communication.

The HANDS related research and researchers have been nominated and received numerous awards. The research agenda is currently funded by NINR for a 4 year R01 focused on thoroughly evaluating HANDS standardized data (through datamining and statistical analyses) and generating best practices and benchmarks for EOL hospitalized patients. Also the research grant is funding the immediate translation of findings into useful and meaningful decision support at the point of care.

Debra Lyon

Debra Lyon PhD, RN, FNP-BC, FNAP, FAAN

Professor and Kirbo Endowed Chair
Research Summary:

Symptom management, including complementary modalities, in women with breast cancer and other chronic illnesses. Biobehavioral research, including molecular markers of inflammation and genetic markers.

Tamara G R Macieira

Tamara G R Macieira PhD, RN

Assistant Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Macieira is an expert in nursing informatics, standardized nursing terminologies, and data science, including the application of machine learning and large language model (LLM) techniques. She has applied these methods specifically to examine the impact of palliative nursing care on hospitalized patient outcomes for cognitively impaired older adults through the analyses of nursing data retrieved from electronic health records (EHRs) from diverse health settings. Dr. Macieira has been dedicated to nursing and informatics research focused on populations with life-limiting chronic conditions (e.g., older adults, and critically ill patients) and the development of technology to improve patient care. Dr. Macieira’s program of research is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health-National Institute on Aging and focuses on the implementation, for the first time, of the research-data infrastructure that will generate and integrate standardized nursing data for over 2 million adult patients into the statewide OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network.

Leslie A Parker

Leslie A Parker PhD, APRN, NNP-BC, FAAN

Associate Dean For Research
Qinglin Pei

Qinglin Pei PhD

Associate Professor
Lisiane Pruinelli

Lisiane Pruinelli PhD, MS, RN, FAMIA

Associate Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Pruinelli’s program of research leverages innovative applied clinical informatics tools and data science methods to investigate the trajectories of complex disease conditions, such as sepsis, solid organs transplantation, and pain management, to improve the patient care experience and increase the quality of health care delivery. She developed foundations for new personalized strategies for disease treatment and management over time, including addressing national initiatives for holistic models of care. Her scholarship reflects a strategic transition from an acute care nurse to a researcher, leveraging informatics knowledge based on consistent formal education, previous clinical care experiences, and data science to build new knowledge. To guide her program of research, Dr. Pruinelli adopt the Applied Data Science Framework for Healthcare Leaders, a roadmap she developed, where shows the life-cycle process to build personalized models of care suitable of clinical applications, from data extraction, mining, analysis, and deployment. Similarly, with the heavily adoption of machine learning across her projects and the adoption of such models to lay the foundation for intelligent systems, she has been deeply involved in discussions around responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI). For more than 10 years she have mainly centered on mining and using EHR data for solid organ transplantation research, and recently linked to national registries. Besides survivorship, she has been investigating other causal factors that has an impact on the overall health status and wellbeing of liver and kidney transplants patients, such as the health conditions amenable of change with targeted interventions. This work is a life-long project, due to the complexity of these patients and the multiples factors contributing to successful outcomes.

Prospective students may want to check Dr. Pruinelli’s Advising Philosophy.

Lisa Scarton

Lisa Scarton PhD, RN

Associate Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Scarton, a citizen of Choctaw Nation, focuses her research on reducing health disparities among American Indian populations through the development of culturally informed interventions delivered across multiple generations and designed to improve health outcomes for persons with type 2 diabetes and T2D linked cancers.

Type 2 diabetes self-management, family interventions, health disparities, health promotion in American Indian populations.

Ellen L Terry

Ellen L Terry Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Terry’s areas of expertise include the influence of biopsychosocial factors on pain and pain processing, health disparities in chronic pain, knowledge in the etiology and course of various mental disorders (e.g., Major Depressive Disorder, Anxiety Disorder), the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy and other related therapies for the treatment of mental disorders, and the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy for chronic pain and pain-related psychosocial factors (e.g., pain catastrophizing).

Diana Wilkie

Diana Wilkie PhD, RN, FAAN

Professor; Prairieview Trust – Earl And Margo Powers Endowed Professor; Director, Center For Palliative Care Research & Education; Director, Florida-California Cancer Research, Education And Engagement (CaRE2) Health Equity Center
Research Summary:

Use of informatics to promote patient-centered care; pain assessment; palliative and end-of-life care; biobehavioral therapies for cancer pain; behavioral correlates of cancer pain; sickle cell disease pain mechanisms, assessment and management; reproductive choices for people with sickle cell disease or sickle cell trait; intervention research.

Yingwei Yao

Yingwei Yao PhD

Research Associate Professor
Research Summary:

Dr. Yao has expertise in study design, power analysis, including longitudinal analysis and missing data processing; machine learning, including dimensionality reduction, model estimation, selection, validation, and testing.

Saun-Joo Yoon

Saun-Joo Yoon PhD, RN

Associate Professor
Research Summary:

Research interests include 1) interventions with use of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) modalities to improve nutritional status, cancer-cachexia and symptom management in adult patients with gastrointestinal cancers, 2) herbal supplement use to manage symptoms and health promotion in older adults, and 3) palliative care related to cancer-cachexia in patients with GI cancers.

Learn more about our research faculty!