Dr. Karstens is an Associate Professor at Oregon Health & Science University in the Departments of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology and Obstetrics and Gynecology.  She is also the Co-Division Head of the Division of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at OHSU. Her research interests broadly span using bioinformatics to understand complex human disease. Her current research focuses on using bioinformatic approaches to understand bladder disorders, with a specific focus on understanding how the human microbiome contributes to bladder health and disease.

While Dr. Karstens' research is interdisciplinary, her expertise is in bioinformatics- specifically microbiome, metabolomics, and neuroimaging analysis. She collaborates with clinicians and molecular biologists on a regular basis on a variety of projects.

Teaching and Mentoring

Dr. Karstens teaches Introduction to Programming for the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at OHSU, which focuses on understanding programming logic and is taught in Python. She mentors many types of students ranging from high school students to graduate students and medical fellows.