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.

Dr. Aiken conducts research on health care outcomes and health workforce policy. She is the principal investigator of a five-country study of hospital care outcomes in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Germany. Dr. Aiken is also 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 the Population Studies Center. Dr. Aiken received her bachelors 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.