A nurse with a track record of excellence in care and leadership, Lori Armstrong serves as Chief Nursing Officer at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center. Armstrong previously served in nursing leadership positions for some of the country’s most renowned women’s and children’s hospitals in the country, including: Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, and Sloane Hospital For Women in New York City. During her time with these hospitals she led system-wide initiatives that increased quality, patient satisfaction, and staff performance and retention. Born in New York, Armstrong started her nursing career caring for some of hospitals’ most-fragile patients: newborns in special Neonatal Intensive Care Units. She was a NICU nurse in Manhasset, New York, then again a few years later at Chicago’s historic Michael Reese Hospital. She became a NICU nurse manager at Chicago’s University of Illinois Hospital, and later, became Director of Neonatal Services at the Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, North Carolina. Armstrong is not only a nurse leader, but also an innovator. In the late 1990’s she and a team re-designed a standard the “headwall” of a neonatal intensive care unit. In a modern hospital, the headwall is where oxygen lines, electrical outlets, and monitoring equipment is organized at head of the bed. Armstrong’s design standardized a similar arrangement for the isolettes used in the NICU. Armstrong came to Stanford in 2001, serving seven years in nursing and neonatal intensive care. Armstrong has a 25-year-old son and a Boston terrier named “Joey”. She has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degrees in Nursing.