Deb Bakerjian is the Associate Dean for Practice and a clinical professor at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis. Dr. Bakerjian was a Pat Archbold Predoctoral Scholar and Claire M. Fagin Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSF where she was also an assistant adjunct professor as well as a Gordon and Betty Moore postdoc at UC Davis. She earned a PhD in Nursing in 2006 and Master’s in Science of Nursing in 1992, both from UC San Francisco School of Nursing and her Family Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant certificate from UC Davis Department of Family and Community Medicine. Her doctoral study, “Utilization of Nurse Practitioners in Nursing Homes: A Comparison with Physicians,” received the 2006 Dissertation of the Year Award at UC San Francisco. Prior to coming to academia, Dr. Bakerjian owned a collaborative practice for over 20 years that provided care to nursing home residents.

She is active in both state and national organizations associated with older adults, quality improvement and patient safety including being the Chair of the Health Sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America. She is also on the Expert Panel on Aging and Quality and Safety in the American Academy of Nursing, and the Chair of HealthImpact the California nursing workforce center.

Her research focuses on healthcare workforce development, patient safety and quality improvement, and interprofessional education and collaborative practice in primary care, with a focus on older adults. Her study of the impact of music on patients with dementia was the first study on Music and Memory in older adults and included how nursing homes could implement a Music and Memory program as a Quality Assurance Performance Improvement project.

Currently, she is the PI for several HRSA funded grants on workforce development including Advanced NP PRACTICE, one of the first federally funded Primary Care Nurse Practitioner Residency/Fellowship programs; IN-LMC, a new grant that will provide funding to develop and implement a Nurse-Led Mobile Clinic to provide care to underserved populations; and she also has funding from the Department of Labor to start a faculty residency program designed to increase the numbers of nurses prepared to be nurse faculty.  She is also a co-PI on a project that enables consumers to compare nursing homes and other LTC organizations.

Dr. Bakerjian serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Geriatric Nursing journal, a co-Editor-in-Chief of The Textbook of Adult-Gerontology Primary Care Nursing: Evidence-Based Care for Patients Across the Lifespan as well as the co-Editor-in-Chief of the AHRQ PSNet website. She has published multiple book chapters as well as over a hundred manuscripts and peer reviewed abstracts. She has also received many honors including being inducted as a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, the Gerontological Society of America, and into the Western Academy of Nursing.