Patricia Benner, RN, PhD, FAAN

Patricia Benner, RN, PhD, FAAN, is Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She directed the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching National Nursing Education Study.

Dr. Benner’s work has made a huge impact on nursing practice. She is noted for further developing the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, which has been widely adopted by hospitals to assess their staff’s progression based on five levels of development. She describes the model in her book From Novice to Expert, which won the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year award in 2002. In 2003, her book was honored by the Institute for Healthcare Leadership in celebration of the 20th anniversary of its original publication.

Among her many recognitions, Dr. Benner was named first Chair Holder of the Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair in Ethics and Spirituality in 2002. In 2008, she was ranked the fourth most influential nurse in the last 60 years by the readership of Nursing Standard.

Dr. Benner earned her Master of Science in Medical/Surgical Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco and her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2009 and continues to work on the university’s undergraduate curriculum redesign. With Principal Director Dr. Pat Kelly, she is a consultant for a federal nursing research study on Clinical Knowledge Development in Combat and Natural Disaster Arenas and Acute and Rehabilitation Care. She assisted in the design and development of a national data collection instrument (TERCAP) with the National Council of State Boards of Nursing to form a database on the nature and types of errors reported to State Boards of Nursing. This project is reported in Nursing Pathways for Patient Safety (Philadelphia, PA: Patricia Benner, Kathy Malloch, and Vickie Sheets, eds.) She is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.