Dr Marsha Fowler

Marsha D Fowler, PhD, MS, MDiv, RN, FAAN. Dr. Fowler is Professor Emerita of Ethics and Spirituality at Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA, USA.  Co-lead writer of ANA Codes of Ethics for Nurses, and co-writer of the recent revision of the ICN Code of Ethics, she is currently co-chair of the ANA Code of Ethics revision.  A graduate of the Kaiser Foundation School of Nursing (diploma), University of California, San Francisco (BS, MS), and Fuller Theological Seminary (MDiv), she also earned a PhD from the University of Southern California.

Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, she is also Fellow, Royal Society of Arts (London), Fulbright Research Award Recipient (2018-2019) and Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard University (1978). Having received many awards and accolades, one of her most treasured roles is as an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, serving disabled, elderly, and immigrant persons in her congregation. 

Dr Fowler has engaged in teaching and research in bioethics, nursing ethics, and spirituality since 1974. Her research interests are in the history and development of nursing ethics and the Code of Ethics for Nurses, social ethics and professions, suffering, and the intersections of spirituality and ethics and religious ethics in nursing.

Fowler has written approximately 200 peer reviewed articles, has a regular ethics column for the Journal of Christian Nursing (JCN), including a 2023 paper (JCN 40(2), 86-95) co-authored with Editor Kathy Schoonover-Shoffner, “Rising to ‘the Highest Morals’: The Rich History of Nursing Ethics,” where she points out that of the nursing ethics literature predates that of bioethics!  With numerous book chapters and 10 books in her repertoire, her most recent work is Nursing Ethics, 1880s to the Present: An Archaeology of Lost Wisdom and Identity, recently published by Routledge (April 2024).