About the Author

Lived Experience

Dr. Charleata Battle is an Assistant Professor of Management and Healthcare Management at California State University, Los Angeles, with more than 26 years of cross-sector experience spanning healthcare, higher education, business, information technology, real estate, and entrepreneurship.

A former neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) patient, Dr. Battle maintains a deeply personal connection to healthcare that informs her commitment to advancing healthcare leadership and system effectiveness. She is an author, researcher, and advocate for the use of big health data to improve decision-making and innovation in healthcare systems.

Dr. Battle is the author of Indefinite Useful Life: Leadership Forged Without an Expiration Date, which explores leadership as an evolving practice shaped by lived experience, resilience, and identity. Her scholarship focuses on healthcare management, healthcare leadership, and medical entrepreneurship, including physician and startup innovation. She recently authored the peer-reviewed article, “Bridging Clinical and Entrepreneurial Intelligence: The Dual Acumen Model for Integrating Scientific Expertise and Innovation Strategy in Healthcare Leadership.”

She is also the founder of Char Battle, Inc., advising healthcare entrepreneurs on sustainable strategy and growth, and remains actively engaged in teaching, research, and professional service.

Scholarship

Dr. Battle’s scholarship examines how leadership, innovation, and lived experience intersect to improve healthcare systems and outcomes. Her research is grounded in the belief that effective healthcare leadership must integrate clinical insight, organizational strategy, and community voice to create meaningful and sustainable impact.

Her work explores healthcare leadership as a dynamic practice shaped by data-informed decision-making, interdisciplinary collaboration, and evolving professional roles. Through the use of qualitative approaches such as photovoice, she amplifies the patient experience, elevating perspectives that are often underrepresented in traditional management research. This work informs more human-centered models of care delivery and organizational leadership.

Dr. Battle also investigates physician entrepreneurship and the growing need for clinicians to develop dual competencies in scientific expertise and innovation strategy. Her research highlights how entrepreneurial thinking can strengthen healthcare delivery, support medical startups, and expand access to solutions that address complex health challenges.

In addition, she contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning, focusing on preparing future healthcare leaders through applied learning, inclusive pedagogy, and practice-based education. Her work aligns with AACSB principles emphasizing meaningful societal impact, including collaborative research projects with community health organizations designed to translate academic insight into real-world benefit.

Across these areas, her scholarship advances excellence in healthcare management by bridging theory, practice, and community engagement to support more adaptive, equitable, and innovative healthcare systems.