Holly Harner, PhD, MBA, MPH

Holly M. Harner, PhD, RN is a Practice Professor of Women’s Health and the Afaf I. Meleis Director of the Center for Global Women’s Health in the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. She also serves as Track Director of the Women’s Health Gender-Related Nurse Practitioner Program at Penn Nursing and continues to practice clinically in the Division of Gynecology at Student Health and Counseling at the University of Pennsylvania.
Throughout her career, Dr. Harner has focused her research and clinical practice on women undergoing extraordinary stress: inpatient psychiatric treatment, adolescent pregnancy, pregnancy termination, and incarceration. Dr. Harner’s scholarship addresses gender-related health disparities with a specific emphasis on women’s mental health and violence. She is particularly interested in examining the role of childhood physical and sexual trauma as a pathway to incarceration for women. She earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the area of forensic mental health, and she completed additional training, receiving a Master of Public Health (MPH) focusing in Family and Community Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. She received an MBA from La Salle University.