THEORIST

         Jean Watson was born in a small town in West Virginia in the 1940s. She was the youngest of eight children, and was surrounded by an extended family-community environment. She graduated from the Lewis Gale School of Nursing in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1961 and continued her nursing studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

        She earned a baccalaureate degree in nursing in 1964 at the Boulder campus, a master’s degree in psychiatric-mental health nursing in 1966 and a doctorate in educational psychology and counselling in 1973. She is a distinguished professor of Nursing and holds an endowed Chair in Caring Science at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She is also the founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado.

     After graduation in 1961, she married her husband Douglas, whom Watson describes not only as her physical and spiritual partner, but also as her best friend, and died in 1998. She has two grown daughters, Jennifer born in 1963, and Julie born in 1967. Her research has been in the area of human caring loss.