For the last five years, Dr. Martha M. Scheckel has served as Editorial Review Group Chair in Nursing Theory. We are grateful that she continues to serve in the role beyond the three years we request, even as she made the move from one position to another. She has organized review of 47 of the 57 books we have sent her, calling on 17 expert reviewers at six institutions.

Dr. Scheckel is Dean and Professor in the College of Nursing, Health and Human Behavior at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She received her Practical and Associate Degree in Nursing from Marshalltown Community College in Iowa. She completed a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, and a Master of Science degree in nursing at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa. She completed her PhD in Nursing with a focus on nursing education research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing.

She has 17 years of nursing practice experience and 14 years of academic teaching and leadership experience. Her nursing practice experience included acute care, home care and hospice, and school nursing. She has held faculty positions at Clarke, Viterbo, and Winona State Universities. She taught primarily community and public health courses. She served as the Undergraduate Programs Director at Michigan State University, and was Chair of the Department of Nursing at Winona State University before assuming the deanship at Viterbo University.

Her scholarship has centered on using qualitative research methods to study nursing education and patient education in rural settings. She has numerous publications, with the most recent including a qualitative study about a curriculum revision in undergraduate nursing education, a chapter in Diane Billings and Judith Halstead’s “Teaching in Nursing: A Guide for Faculty” and a chapter in Judith’s Halstead’s book “NLN Core Competencies for Nurse Educators: A Decade of Influence.” She was a Leadership Mentor for the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing’s Nurse Faculty Leadership Academy, and is a Fellow in the Leadership for Academic Nursing Program through the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. She has received a number of awards, including designation as a Julia Hardy RN/American Nurses Foundation Scholar, recipient of the Eckburg Dissertation Award, the Award of Distinction-Candidacy Exam from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Outstanding Innovative Health Care Service Award, Second Congressional District, Wisconsin.