Dr. Stuenkel enjoys teaching across all levels of the curriculum—baccalaureate, master's and doctoral. Her clinical background is in adult critical care nursing. She became interested in nursing research as a master's student at San José State. A faculty member invited Stuenkel to join a research team interested in exploring factors in the work environment that contribute to nursing satisfaction and retention. Findings indicated that salary and supervisory support were key factors.

Several years later, Stuenkel served as project manager for this same research team that replicated the study at two other Bay Area hospitals. As a doctoral student, she examined predictors of student success on the NCLEX-RN, with a focus on identifying students at risk and continues to explore the topic of student success.

As a San José State DNP program faculty member, she has served as a DNP project chair. Because of her acute care background, she was paired with Christine (Derenzi) Tarver, a spring 2015 DNP graduate. Drs. Tarver and Stuenkel's research was published in the Journal of Nursing Care Quality and was featured on the JNCQ website.

​Key findings include statistically significant differences between medical-surgical patients who had a rapid response team intervention (RRTI) and those who did not. RRTI patients were older, more likely to have a cardiac or psychiatric co-morbidity, and had more respiratory medications and more psychogenic medications prescribed. The amount of time it took to call a RRTI from the time a trigger was first identified was an important finding and ranged from 0 to 238 minutes. This finding suggests nurses are assessing and identifying triggers appropriately yet delay calling the rapid response team.​