Karen Giuliano

Karen Giuliano, PhD, RN, MBA, FAAN, has more than 25 years of experience spanning critical care nursing, medical product development, and patient-centered outcomes research. Her work integrates frontline clinical expertise with human-centered design and interdisciplinary collaboration and is driven by the question of how technology can better support safe, effective, and compassionate care.

Her research concentrates on two areas with broad clinical impact: prevention of non‑ventilator hospital‑acquired pneumonia (NVHAP), one of the most common and preventable hospital‑acquired infections, and improving the safety and usability of intravenous (IV) smart infusion pumps, essential for safe medication delivery but still vulnerable to design flaws, alarm fatigue, and workflow disruption.

Giuliano is a practicing nurse scientist at Baystate Health and holds joint appointments at UMass Amherst in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences and the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing. She is the founding co‑director of the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation, where she leads interdisciplinary nurse‑engineer collaborations with academic, clinical, and industry partners. Her work exemplifies the power of cross‑disciplinary research to advance patient safety, reduce clinician burden, and set new standards for technology design in health care. Giuliano also serves as an adjunct professor in the Daniel J. Riccio Jr. College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and at UMass Chan Medical School‑Baystate.