Karen Giuliano

Karen Giuliano has over 25 years of experience in critical care nursing, medical product development and innovation, and patient-centered clinical outcomes research. Her primary focus is in general acute and critical care with a special interest in using human-centered design to better understand how clinical needs, medical technology use, product development and innovation intersect to improve the process of care for clinicians and the experience of care for patients. 

Giuliano is currently an associate professor (Joint) College of Nursing & Institute for Applied Life Sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to transition to academia in 2017, Karen spent 18 years working on medical product development from an industry perspective, including 12 years with Philips Healthcare. Karen actively contributes to many professional organizations and continues to work with small, medium and large companies on medical product development and innovation.  In addition, her own interdisciplinary program of research is focused in two main areas: non-ventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia and IV infusion safety using IV Smart Pumps. 

In her joint faculty position, Giuliano hopes to expand capacity for clinician-driven medical product innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration and the development of two laboratories.  First, a product prototyping where design-thinking, human-factors principles, and rapid iterative prototyping can be used for product creation. Second, the plan is to build a product usability lab to support end-user testing as part of the product development process.  These two labs will provide the infrastructure needed for clinical, academic, and industry collaborations to further enrich our product innovation capabilities and speed up the realization of innovations into clinical practice.