School of Nursing

Marie Fongwa is a Cameroon-born and educated registered nurse midwife. Her professional work experiences span from acute care and hospital bedside nursing care in Cameroon to care in long-term and rehabilitation hospitals, occupational health nursing care, and disability case management in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fongwa taught at the UCLA School of Nursing from 2001 to 2009. She joined the APU School of Nursing faculty in January 2010.

Fongwa is a health services researcher whose overarching goal is to promote culturally sensitive and competent care. Her research captures crosscultural comparisons on quality of care, health-related instrument development, and secondary data analyses. She presents and publishes findings from her research studies. Her dissertation is entitled "Dimensions of Quality of Care: African Americans’ Perspectives."

Fongwa has completed a two-year National Institute on Aging-funded postdoctoral research training at the School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. She reviews for several peer-reviewed journals and is one of six doctorally prepared experts on cultural competence nursing care who designed, wrote, and disseminated AACN’s six core cultural competencies and toolkit for graduate nursing education. Fongwa is a role model for several international students and a mentor for many, including doctoral students.