"Who I Was Meant to Be": Welcoming Professor Karli Bell

Professor Karli Bell (BS ‘07) is joining BYU College of Nursing as an assistant teaching professor this semester. With 15 years of experience in medical-surgical nursing and several years of teaching behind her, she brings both depth and enthusiasm to her new role. “I’m excited to be here at BYU,” she said—and it shows.

The oldest of six children, Professor Bell grew up in Sandy, Utah. She describes herself as the “nerdy, academic” sibling in a family of athletes. Several of her siblings went on to compete in college sports, and although she didn’t follow that path, she still teases them that she could have, if she’d wanted to.

She met her husband as a BYU undergraduate studying nursing. Today they have five children: a son currently serving a mission in Sweden, three teenage daughters, and an 11-year-old boy. As a family they love hiking, skiing, and especially boating. Visiting Lake Powell is their annual tradition. “Lake Powell is like my heaven on earth,” she said.

Outside of family adventures, Professor Bell is an avid reader and audiobook listener. She gravitates toward novels about nurses in wartime, but her favorite series is The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, which she describes as “a mix of Downton Abbey and Tina Fey comedy.” Professor Bell also loves to work out, “It clears the cobwebs in my brain,” she said. On Thursday mornings she gets some laps in at the pool before work.

Nursing has been part of her identity since childhood. Her mother worked in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at Primary Children’s Hospital, and young Karli admired her deeply. “I just always really loved and respected her and thought nursing sounded like a really awesome mom job.” During her first semester at BYU, she met with her academic advisor to talk about majoring in nursing: “I just knew that’s who I was meant to be.”

After graduating, she entered the world of medical-surgical nursing, which she absolutely loved. “You take a lot of patients, see a broad variety of things, and kind of run your heinie off the whole shift,” she said laughingly. Those 15 years gave her what she considers the perfect foundation for her nursing and teaching career. She now writes certification questions for the American Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses.

A decade after earning her bachelor’s degree, she felt a pull toward something more. “When I was at the hospital and they would assign me a student, I was like, ‘Yes! Best shift ever!’” This feeling led her to pursue a master’s degree in nursing education.

After completing her master’s, she joined a research team at St. Luke’s Hospital in Boise, Idaho, where she and a team of physicians and a pharmacist administered phase 3 study medications to a broad variety of patients including individuals with Type 1 Diabetes, Cystic Fibrosis, cancer and the Sars-COV-2 Virus. “It was a very rewarding part of my career,” she says. “I was sad to leave my research job.”

When her family moved back to Utah, she began teaching at Arizona College of Nursing. But BYU always stayed in her mind. “I just never could get over the experience I had here [as a student]—being able to integrate the gospel with nursing practice.”

Now, as she begins her professorship at BYU, her vision is rooted in what she feels reflects the true spirit of nursing: caring deeply for others.

“I don’t just care about my students’ grades: I want to know how they’re doing in their personal life, and how they’re doing with their spirituality. And I think that’s a way that nurses can really benefit the patients that they take care of—not just caring about their physical health but caring about them holistically.”

This semester, Professor Bell is teaching NURS 290: Think like a Nurse, NURS 342: Clinical Practice Acute and Chronic Illness, and for this spring’s Global and Population Health Nursing Clinical Practicum in Ghana: NURS 403: Public and Global Health Preparation.