Betty Chang, DNSc

Betty Chang earned a BS and MA in nursing from Columbia Universityís Teachersí College in 1961 and then worked as an academic nursing educator for 16 years, first at Queens College in New York and subsequently at San Francisco State University. While on the SF State faculty in the 1970s, she worked on her DNSc degree in nursing care of the elderly, completing that training in 1977, and then moved to UCLA, where she has risen to a full professorship in the School of Nursing over the years. While at UCLA, she completed a certification in Nursing Informatics and became credentialed as a family nurse practitioner. Dr. Chang led one of the earliest research projects on knowledge-based systems in nursing. Funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research in the early 1980s, CANDI was designed to assist nurses with the process of generating a nursing diagnosis from the patientís signs and symptoms. Her recent research on consumer health informatics builds on a program of research on the elderly and their family caregivers and other vulnerable populations including those with HIV/AIDS. Dr. Chang is a respected senior nursing informatics scholar whose leadership in nursing informatics has spanned more than two decades. For the past 20 years, she has served as Departmental Editor on Nursing Informatics for Research in Nursing and Health, a highly regarded research journal. She has actively promoted the use of computers for nursing practice, education, and research and serves as a role model for nursing informatics innovation. During the past five years, Dr. Chang has led a number of consumer health initiatives for both AMIA and IMIA, leading an AMIA Symposium Post-Conference on the topic of consumer health informatics and, more recently, chairing the 2003 Spring AMIA meeting that focused on digital divide and the use of informatics in underserved populations.