She initially intended to be a clinician and worked at Shands Teaching Hospital for a few years before deciding to return to school.
[2] She decided to return to school and received a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in Demography in 1973.
[citation needed] Following completion of her post-doc in 1974, Aiken began work as a program officer for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
In addition, she is a Research Associate and on the Executive Committee at the Population Studies Center at Penn as well as a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
[5] She is co-director of the RN4CAST, a study of the nursing workforce and quality of hospital care for fourteen countries: Europe, China, South Africa, and Botswana.
In 2006, she was chosen as the inaugural recipient for the Baxter International Foundation's William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research, and also in 2003, she received the Individual Earnest A. Codman Award from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) for her leadership performing and demonstrating relationships of nursing care and patient outcomes.