New Professorship for Lake
Eileen Lake, PhD, MSN, MA, BSN, FAAN has been named the Edith Clemmer Steinbright Professor in Gerontology, effective September 1, 2021.
September 16, 2021Lake is Professor of Nursing and Sociology and Associate Director of Penn Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR). She is an international leader in the theory and methods of nursing systems research. She developed a foundational measure of nursing care performance to demonstrate nursing’s impact on patient outcomes: the Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index. She led national and international investigations that study how nurse satisfaction and working conditions can impact patient care quality, specifically patient safety, and satisfaction. Her work nationally with the staffing in Magnet® hospitals contributed to U.S. News & World Report adding Magnet® status as a criterion in its “America’s Best Hospitals” designation. With so many of our hospital patients being older adults, this work has proven to be invaluable. Most recently, Lake developed a line of inquiry on hospital response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the impacts on staff nurses and racial and ethnic minority patients. Older adults, many affected by the pandemic, will benefit from this research as well.
Lake teaches an undergraduate course that integrates research methods with evidence-based practice and another that compares the health systems of the U.S. and Chile. As associate director of CHOPR, she co-directs an interdisciplinary research and training program, mentors pre- and post-doctoral students, and supervises undergraduate students as research assistants.
The Edith Clemmer Steinbright Chair of Gerontology was established by Marilyn Steinbright in 1996 in memory of her mother, Edith C. Steinbright, co-founder of the Arcadia Foundation.