Died 22 February 2008 | ||
Marie Jeanette Johnson Cowan (July 20, 1938 - February 22, 2008) was an American nurse and academic who conducted cardiovascular research. A faculty member at Seattle University and the University of Washington, Cowan was hired as the nursing school dean at UCLA in 1997. She was a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing.
Biography
Cowan completed a diploma nursing program in San Francisco and later earned a Ph.D. at the University of Washington in an interdisciplinary program combining pathology, biophysics and physiology. She started her academic career as a professor at Seattle University. Later, she conducted basic science and nursing science research as a professor at the University of Washington. There, she held joint appointments in the nursing school and in the medical school's departments of pathology and cardiology. She was continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after 1977.
She was hired as dean of the nursing school at UCLA in 1997. She instituted a basic sciences emphasis in the nursing Ph.D. program, and in 2006 she reestablished the school's undergraduate nursing program that had been lost prior to her arrival at the university due to lack of funding. Cowan served on the first NIH peer review group established for nurses.
In 2007, Cowan was designated a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing. She died in 2008 after suffering from colon cancer for ten years. She had been married to Samuel Cowan since 1961. The American Heart Association's Council on Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing presents the Marie Cowan Promising Young Investigator Award to honor early-career researchers in the field.