Sister Callista Roy

A recognized nurse theorist, researcher, writer and teacher Martha Elizabeth Rogers was born on May 12, 1914 in Dallas Texas as the first born daughter and oldest of four siblings of Mr and Mrs. Rogers. As the oldest of four siblings Sister Callista Roy was born on October 14, 1939 as the second child but first daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Fabien Roy. Devote Catholics her parents name her after Saint Callistus from a Roman Catholic Calendar of the day on which she was born. The daughter of a licensed nurse Callista was continuously taught the importance of knowing all you could about people, the care they needed and most importantly the selfless giving as a nurse. By the age of 14 Callista began working at a large general hospital as a pantry girl and quickly moved up in rank to a nurse's aid.

Being raised in a highly religious oriented family Callista reached a crossroads in her life and after much soA deep spirit of faith, hope, love and commitment to God and service to others was central in this family of seven boys and seven girls. Her mother was a licensed vocational nurse and instilled the values of always seeking to know more about people and their care and of selfless giving as a nurse. Dr. Roy notes that she also had excellent teachers in parochial schools, high school, and college. At age 14 she began working at a large general hospital, first as a pantry girl, then as a maid, and finally as a nurse's aid. After a soul-searching process of discernment, she decided to enter the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet, of which she has been a member for more than 40 years. Her college education began in a liberal arts program, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts with a major in nursing at Mount St. Mary's College, in Los Angeles.

As a young Sister nurse, Sr. Callista worked in hospitals administered by the Sisters of St. Joseph in Idaho and Arizona. Here she expanded her love and concern for children, working in pediatric nursing and soon had the opportunity to enroll in a master's degree program in pediatric nursing at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1964. Through her studies in pediatric nursing, Sr. Callista had the significant opportunity of working with Dorothy E. Johnson, whom she regards as one of her most influential mentors. Other important mentors have included Ruth Wu, Connie Robinson and Barbara Smith Moran.

Johnson's work with focusing knowledge for the discipline of nursing convinced Sr. Callista of the importance of describing the nature of nursing as a service to society and prompted her to begin developing her model with the goal of nursing being to promote adaptation. She joined the faculty of Mount St. Mary's College in 1966, teaching both pediatric and maternity nursing and began organizing course content according to a view of the person and family as adaptive systems. However, the following academic year she was forced to take a leave of absence since she was bed-ridden with an illness then diagnosed as encephalomyelitis. Twelve years later, she had successful surgery for removal of an acoustic neuroma. When she returned to Mount Saint Mary's College in the fall of 1968, she began actively introducing her ideas about Adaptation Nursing as the basis for an integrated nursing curriculum. The encouragement and support she received from Sr. Rebecca Doan, chair and founder of the department, was important in moving the development of the model forward and establishing Mount St. Mary's, her alma mater, as the flagship school in the development and implementation of the model. In 1971 she was made chair of the nursing department at the college. Dr. Roy completed her PhD in sociology at University of California, Los Angeles.

By 1981, the teaching of the model had become widespread and Dr. Roy and her colleagues from Mount St. Mary's College provided consultation for at least 30 other schools on implementation of the model in nursing curricula from the associate to doctoral levels. In 1987 it was estimated that over 100,000 nurses had graduated from schools emphasizing the Roy Adaptation Model. During this time, Dr. Roy also served on the faculty at the University of Portland in Oregon were she helped to establish a master's of science program in nursing. She gained a reputation as an international speaker and accepted commitments to speak throughout North America and close to 30 other countries over the past 30 years on topics related to the Roy Adaptation Model, nursing theory, research, curriculum, clinical practice and professional trends for the future. Her books have been translated into twelve different languages.

Dr. Roy also had the opportunity to be a clinical nurse scholar in a two-year postdoctoral program in Neuroscience Nursing at University of California at San Francisco. She selected this field to develop her understanding of the holistic person, especially as an adaptive system, and because of her familiarity with this clinical area as a result of her own neurological illnesses. Here her research became increasingly focused on the cognitive recovery of head injury patients. After completing her postdoctoral work, Dr. Roy began concurrently teaching graduate nursing theory courses at the University