Deena Costa, PhD, RN

Associate Professor, Nursing
Co-director, National Clinician Scholars Program at IHPI 

734-764-2818
dkcosta@umich.edu

Dr. Costa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems, Populations & Leadership in the School of Nursing at the University of Michigan. She received a bachelor’s degree in Italian Studies from Boston University in 2004, a BSN from Binghamton University in 2005 and a Masters & PhD from University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, she completed her doctoral work as a member of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research working with Dr. Linda Aiken and colleagues. Prior to joining the University of Michigan faculty in 2014, Dr. Costa was the first nurse to complete a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in the Clinical Research, Investigations and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness (CRISMA) Center working with Dr. Jeremy Kahn. In addition to her research training, Dr. Costa has years of experience as a critical care nurse, working in medical and surgical ICUs in Boston and Philadelphia.

Dr. Costa’s research focuses on improving outcomes of critically ill adults by optimizing the organization and management of critical care services. She is most interested in ways to improve the structure and function of the ICU interprofessional team. The underlying premise in Dr. Costa’s work is that high quality critical care is provided by well-coordinated and collaborative multi-professional teams and to improve outcomes for critically ill adults, we must improve ICU interprofessional care delivery. Dr. Costa’s work integrates approaches from epidemiology, health services methodology and systems science to provide novel solutions to critical care delivery issues.