HISTORY

Sigma Theta Tau was founded in 1922 by six nursing students at Indiana University. Modern nursing was barely 20 years old when Mary Tolle, Edith Moore, Marie Hippensteel, Dorothy Garrigus, Elizabeth Russell and Elizabeth McWilliams met to found a Society to advance the status of nursing as a profession. They recognized the value of scholarship and the importance of excellence in practice. With the full idealism of women forging pathways of change in the 1920s, they wanted to build a framework to encourage future leaders to effectively improve health care.

In 1936, Sigma Theta Tau was the first organization in the U.S. to fund nursing research. Since then the Society has underwritten more than 250 small or "seed" grants, which often begin a whole body of research. These peer-reviewed grants are often the first recognition of potent concepts that eventually lead to major, wide-scale research projects and innovation in the nursing profession.