Doris Schaeffer

Doris Schaeffer is a Senior Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance. She has been Professor of Public Health at Bielefeld University since 1997, where she heads the department Health Services Research and the Institute of Nursing Science. She worked for many years at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) in the department of public health, and at the Free University Berlin, Institute for Social Medicine, among others. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and visiting professor at the University of Vienna. Her core research areas are coping with chronic illness, patient orientation and user involvement, health literacy and patient information, as well as health services research (especially in nursing). She holds a PhD from the Free University of Berlin.