Karen M. Kramer, PhD

Research Assistant Professor

Research Interests
Complete Biosketch

BS, 1993, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
MS, 1996, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
MA, 1998, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
PhD, 2003, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Phone:  316-293-1818
Fax:        316-293-2695
E-mail:   kkramer@kumc.edu

Research Interests

• Medical Decision Making
• Behavioral Cancer
• Mathematical Modeling of Judgment and Choice
• Information Usage on Tests and Surveys

Biosketch

Dr. Kramer is a research assistant professor with the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita (KUSM-W). She earned all four of her degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and focused on training in Quantitative Psychology. Her Master of Science degree is in Statistics, with an additional specialization in psychometrics and behavioral statistics. For her Master of Arts degree in Psychology she investigated the role of uncertainty in a choice paradigm (Ellsberg’s paradox) and developed descriptive models of how uncertainty and other decision elements change choices. In her dissertation she explored the role of differing levels of information in a judgment and choice paradigm (Support Theory) and introduced a new extended mathematical model relating information levels to judgment. After graduation she had a post-doctoral fellowship jointly held at Edward Hines Jr. VAMC and Northwestern University, where she engaged in research about health outcomes and medical decision making in prostate cancer.

Dr. Kramer develops and applies mathematical models of decision-making to predict and explain various situations in medicine. Her current research focuses on two topics of application: behavioral cancer and medical expertise development. Behavioral cancer research acknowledges the role of psychological issues in treatment and seeks to increase survival and improve post-treatment quality of life for patients and their families. Using mathematical and empirical models, Dr. Kramer studies the influence of risk, uncertainty, and different wordings in descriptions of cancer treatments on the treatment preferences of patients, and links these to health outcomes. By understanding these influences she can help clinicians interested in shared decision making make better choices with their patients. By helping the patients understand their health preferences, she hopes to ease the patient’s psychological acceptance of treatments and of changes to the patient’s health status quo. Immediate future research will develop measurement tools for shared decision making in prostate cancer and colorectal cancer, and she hopes to extend this work to all forms of cancer. For her involvement in cancer research she was granted full membership in the Kansas Masonic Cancer Research Institute / University of Kansas Cancer Research Institute in the group’s inception year.

Dr. Kramer’s work with information usage in decisions has also led into potential applications with education. She is currently exploring the role of knowledge in modifying information presentation effects, and an application to medical expertise development.