Biography
Dr. Bender’s research focuses on the relationships between the organization of care delivery, multi-professional practice dynamics, and patient care quality and safety outcomes. Her most recent work seeks to conceptualize and quantify the efficacy of a model that integrates a new role, the clinical nurse leader (CNL), into nursing care delivery. This program of research intersects with implementation science as it explores how care interventions, context (people, things, and processes that characterize where the intervention is introduced), and implementation (processes of intervention integration) interact with each other to influence outcomes. Philosophically, Dr. Bender has focused on engaging and re-interpreting fundamental disciplinary concepts such as the nursing metaparadigm and art-science dualism using a process philosophy lens. She is also founding Director of the Center for Nursing Philosophy, which provides a platform for engaging the local, national, and international nursing community and aims to advance novel scholarship elucidating the assumptions, principles, and concepts driving the discipline.
Research Interests
Clinical leadership, healthcare processes and outcomes, implementation science, nursing care models, nursing philosophy
Education
BS University of California, Irvine, 1989, Biological Sciences
MSN Univerisity of San Diego, 2008, Clinical Leadership
PhD University of San Diego, 2013, Nursing Science
Honors and Awards
- 2022 Fellow UC Irvine Faculty Academy for Teaching Excellence (FATE)
- 2021 Fellow American Academy of Nursing
- 2016 Fellow Training Institute for NIH Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health
- 2013 New Investigator Award Academy Health’s Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues (IRGNI)
