Dr. Karen Courtney (PhD Nursing, Missouri-Columbia, 2006; MSN Nursing Administration/Informatics, Duke, 2002; BSN Nursing with Honors, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996; BA Psychology, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1990) held a National Library of Medicine Pre-doctoral Fellowship in Health Informatics Research while completing her PhD in Nursing. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Health Information Science at the University of Victoria.

She conducts research in virtual care and community-based health information technology projects. These projects have community-dwelling individuals at the center and focus on meeting the self-identified needs and values of patients and family caregivers.  Her current funded work focuses on modernizing gender, sex and sexual orientation terminology and associated clinical practices with digital health information systems. 

She is the lead of the inter-institutional Digital Health Equity Group and co-lead of the Sex and Gender Working Group at Canada Health Infoway. She is a co-facilitator for the HL7 Anatomical Inventories & Person Characteristics Project.  She has been a primary investigator or co-investigator on a number of grants in Canada (CIHR, Health Research BC) and the United States (NIH, AHRQ). She is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Karen served as Graduate Advisor at the School of Health Information Science (2013 – 2017; 2018 – 2024).