Linda H. Aiken is the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, Dr. Aiken was Vice President of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where she directed its research and evaluation program.
Dr. Aiken is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences where she is a member of the Board on Health Care Services. She is a fellow and former president of the American Academy of Nursing and an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Nursing of the United Kingdom. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy. She is a member of the Council on the Economic Impact of Health System Change and served on the Medicare Physician Payment Review Commission for six years. In 2006, she was awarded the Baxter International Foundation’s William B. Graham Prize for health Services Research and in 2006 received the AcademyHealth Distinguished Investigator Award in Health Services Research.
Dr. Aiken conducts research on health care outcomes, health workforce policy, and is an authority on the causes, consequences, and solutions for nurse shortages in the United States and around the world. She is the co-director of RN4CAST, a European Union-funded study of nurse workforce and quality of care in 12 European countries, China, and South Africa. She is also the director of RN4Cast-United States, a NINR-funded study of the outcomes of nursing care in hospitals, nursing homes, home care, and office-based practices. Dr. Aiken is additionally involved in evaluating the impact of 90 health care partnerships funded by the United States Agency for International Development in Eurasia.
Dr. Aiken’s other appointments at the University of Pennsylvania include director of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Program of the Center for AIDS Research, senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, and research associate at the Population Studies Center. Dr. Aiken received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing from the University of Florida, Gainesville, and her Ph.D. in sociology and demography from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a postdoctoral research fellow in medical sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
