Afaf Meleis

Afaf Ibrahim Meleis is an Egyptian-American nurse-scientist, researcher and medical sociologist, born in 1942. Raised in Alexandria, Egypt, by a mother who was herself a pioneering nurse educator, she took her nursing degree at Alexandria University in 1961, then came to the United States as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and earned her master's degrees and doctorate at UCLA. She taught at UCLA and the University of California, San Francisco for 34 years, and from 2002 to 2014 served as Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also directed the School's WHO Collaborating Center for Nursing and Midwifery Leadership. Her research addresses women's and immigrant health, global health and nursing knowledge, and she and her colleagues developed Transitions Theory, a framework for understanding how patients and families experience change. She led a fundraising campaign of 109.3 million dollars and was named a Great Immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation in 2020.