Honored Alumni Award is bestowed upon alumni of BYU College of Nursing who have given outstanding (beyond the normal expectation) service to their profession, community, nation, or church. The honoree is featured in the annual College Honored Alumni Lecture Series and is honored at a special luncheon with the President of the University. The honoree is a guest of the University at all Homecoming events.



Elaine Sorensen Marshall served as Dean of the College of Nursing from 1999 - 2006. She currently holds the Bulloch Hospital Endowed Chair in Community Nursing at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA.

She earned B.S. and M.S. in Nursing, and Ph.D. in Health Education and Nursing from the University of Utah. Her clinical background is in family-child and community nursing. She has worked in hospitals and in community health, and served for 18 months as a health services missionary in Colombia, South America. Prior to her faculty appointment at BYU in 1987, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Utah College of Nursing. At BYU she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in maternal-child nursing, nursing leadership, community nursing, nursing theory, research, and religion. Prior to her appointment as Dean, she was Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship.

Under her leadership, donated funds to the College of Nursing increased from a few thousand dollars to over a million dollars, and the nursing graduate program moved from unranked to 58th rank in the US News and World Report. Other College achievements include strengthening the undergraduate program, projects to increase undergraduate enrollment, steady increases in faculty scholarship, expansion of international experiences, and refining the College mission. She forged a partnership with Oregon Health and Science University to provide the Ph.D. program to BYU faculty by teleconferencing, and negotiated support for faculty doctoral study. She established the College Alumni Board, the College Volunteer Leadership Council, and the College development office, and led the College in hosting national meetings of the Neuman Systems Trustees and the American Association for the History of Nursing.

As a leader in the discipline, she has served as Vice President of the American Association for the History of Nursing (AAHN) and on executive boards of the Western Institute of Nursing (WIN), the Western Society for Research in Nursing, and Thrasher Research fund; also on committees of the National Council on Family Relations, and as an adjunct reviewer for the Nursing Research Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. She has been Chair of the Master’s Conference Committee and a member of the Program Committee of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). She was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the local region of Intermountain Health Care.

Recent honors include Distinguished Service Award from Utah Organization of Nurse Leaders, AACN/Fuld Leadership Fellow, the Lavinia Dock Award from AAHN, and the Jo Eleanor Elliott Leadership Award from WIN. She was also named Nurse of the Year for Excellence in Nursing Research by the Utah State Nurses Association, one of the Top 25 Women in Health Care by Utah Business Magazine, and Best of State Utah educator.

She is the author of over 50 book chapters, professional, and popular articles, and has given over 130 professional and research presentations. Her book, Children’s Stress and Coping: A Family Perspective, was awarded the New Professional Book Award by the National Council on Family Relations. Her latest book with co-editor Russell Crane, Handbook of Families and Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2006) was positively reviewed by the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Alumni Board College of Nursing
500 SWKT
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602-5544



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