Marilyn Anne Ray, RN, BSN, MSN, MA, PhD, CTN-A, FSfAA, FAAN is Professor Emeritus at Florida Atlantic University, Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing, Boca Raton, Florida. She holds a diploma in Nursing from St. Joseph Hospital, Hamilton, Canada; Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Nursing from the University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado; Master of Arts, in Cultural Anthropology from McMaster
University, Hamilton, Canada; a Doctor of Philosophy in Transcultural Nursing from the University of Utah College of Nursing, Salt Lake City, Utah; and an honorary degree from Nevada State College, Henderson, Nevada. Ray has held faculty positions at the University of San Francisco, University of California San Francisco, McMaster University, the University of Colorado, and the Eminent Scholar positions at Florida
Atlantic University and Virginia Commonwealth University, and Professorial and Professor Emeritus positions at Florida Atlantic University. In addition, Ray attended Ethics Courses at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and studied with the theoretical physicist, Dr. F. David Peat on Complexity Science at the Pari Center for New Learning in Pari, Italy. Ray is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology (FSfAA), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN). She is certified as an Advanced Transcultural Nurse (CTN-A), and was awarded the position of a Transcultural Nursing Scholar from the Transcultural Nursing Society.

For 32 years, Ray served the United States of America in the field of aerospace nursing administration, flight nursing, practice, education, and research as an officer in the United States Air Force Reserve (USAFR), Nurse Corps and retired as a Colonel in 1999. Her uniform is in the Archives of Caring in Nursing at Florida Atlantic University. Ray attended a program in space education at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama in preparation for the potential role of "nurses in space." Ray is featured in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World. Ray has researched, presented and published nationally and internationally n the subjects of caring science, holistic nursing, transcultural caring, technological caring, and caring ethics in complex organizations, primarily hospitals, and discovered the Theory of Bureaucratic Caring in 1981, and with Dr. Marian Turkel, the Theory of Relational Caring Complexity, and also advanced the Theory of Transcultural Caring Dynamics in Nursing and Health Care.

Ray is a charter member and served on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Human Caring (IAHC) from 2012-2015. Ashe currently is Co-Chair of the IAHC By-Laws Committee. An award is presented each year in honor of Ray's late husband, James L. Droesbeke to an international student of caring science. Ray’s books include, A Study of Caring within an Institutional Culture: The Discovery of the Theory of Bureaucratic Caring; Transcultural Caring Dynamics in Nursing and Health Care [2nd edition in press]; The Ethics of Care and the Ethics of Cure: Synthesis in Chronicity, and with her colleagues, Davidson and Turkel, Nursing, caring, and complexity science: For human-environment wellbeing (2011 American Journal of Nursing, Book of the Year Award for Professional Development). Ray is in the process of contributing to a book with Dr. Mary Enzman Hines for the Dr. Max van Manen book series, the Phenomenology of Practice focusing on the Phenomenology of Caring Practice. Ray serves on the board of the Anne Boykin Institute (ABI) for the Advancement of Caring Science and is the Chair of the Faculty Development, Learning Partnerships Committee. She is on the boards of the Global Qualitative Nursing Research (on line journal), Qualitative Health Research, and the Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Nursing and Health Sciences, and is a reviewer for Nursing Inquiry and the Journal of Transcultural Nursing. Her website is http://www.marilynray.com.