Mary Jane Smith, PhD, RN, FAAN, earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from University of Pittsburgh and her doctorate from New York University. She has held faculty positions at the following nursing schools: University of Pittsburg, Duquesne University, Cornell University-New York Hospital, and The Ohio State University. Currently, Dr. Smith is a professor of nursing at West Virginia University School of Nursing; she has been teaching theory to master's and doctoral nursing students for over 4 decades.

Joyce J. Fitzpatrick, PhD, MBA, RN, FAAN, is Elizabeth Brooks Ford Professor of Nursing, Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, where she was Dean from 1982 through 1997. She is also Professor, Department of Geriatrics, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY. In 1990, Dr. Fitzpatrick received an honorary doctorate, Doctor of Humane Letters, from her alma mater, Georgetown University. In 2011 she received an honorary doctorate, Doctor of Humane Letters, from the Frontier University of Nursing. She has received numerous honors and awards; she was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing in 1981 and a Fellow in the National Academies of Practice in 1996. She received the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award 18 times. Dr. Fitzpatrick is widely published in nursing and health care literature with over 300 publications. She served as co-editor of the Annual Review of Nursing Research series, vols. 1-26; she edits the journals Applied Nursing Research, Archives in Psychiatric Nursing, and Nursing Education Perspectives, the official journal of the National League for Nursing. She edited three editions of the classic Encyclopedia of Nursing Research (ENR), and a series of nursing research digests