Karen is a Professor of Medicine in the division of General Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where her work focuses on the identification, synthesis and presentation of evidence for informing healthcare decisions and research. She is the Director of the AHRQ-funded Johns Hopkins University Evidence-based Practice Center, having worked with the centre since it was established in 1997. She has worked with professional organizations and government bodies in developing guidelines, and served on panels reviewing and developing evidence-based methods and policy (i.e., NASEM). Karen has also worked with organizations to develop or refine their guideline development processes. She teaches and conducts research on the methods of systematic reviews and guideline development. She is a member with G-I-N and currently participate as a steering committee member of G-I-N North America and have also served on GIN-Tech. She is active in groups seeking to facilitate more efficient, and rigorous, systematic reviews and links between reviews and guidelines (i.e., as former two-term chair of board of governance for Systematic Review Data Repository (SRDR); as an initial invited participant and member for International Collaboration for the Automation of System Reviews (ICASR); as a founding steering committee member for the Evidence-based Research Network). Karen is particularly interested in how to create new and improved links between systematic reviewers and guideline developers, especially as we strive toward living systematic reviews and guidelines.

Karen has been active in Cochrane since 1995, as an author and editor, as well as in leadership roles on committees and groups. She is also an editor with the Cochrane Methodology Review Group.