Dr. Benner is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and former Senior Scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Dr. Patricia Benner is a noted nursing educator and author of From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Nursing Practice, which has been translated into ten languages. She directed the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching National Nursing Education Study, (Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation. Benner, P., Sutphen, M., Leonard, V., Day, L.: Jossey-Bass 2009) which is the first such study in forty years. Additionally, she collaborated with the Carnegie Preparation for the Professions studies of clergy, engineering, law, and medicine.
Dr. Benner developed a nursing taxonomy of nursing error with colleagues at the National Council of State Boards of Nursing which has resulted an intake and research instrument for a national data base on nursing errors reported to State Boards of Nursing. This work is reported in the book Nursing pathways to patient safety. Benner, P., Malloch, K., & Sheets, V. Elsevier. She is the first author of Expertise in Nursing Practice: Caring, Ethics and Clinical Judgment (2010) with Christine Tanner and Catherine Chesla, and Clinical Wisdom in Acute and Critical Care: A Thinkjing-in-Action Approach. with Pat Hooper-Kyriakidis and Daphne Stannard. She has coauthored and authored 13 other notable books.
Dr. Benner is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Nursing. Her work has influence beyond nursing in the areas of clinical practice, education, clinical ethics and qualitative research methods. She has received two honorary doctorates. She is the recipient of the 2010 President's Award for Creativity and Innovation in Nursing Education, National League for Nursing.
She is currently Co Investigator Director of the "Clinical Knowledge Development of Nurses in an Operational environment" project to study the health care of wounded warriors in the combat arena through to rehabilitation. This study is currently in its second phase of the study.