In the early 1900’s, Jusaburo and Shigeyo Nishimura Fujiki immigrated from Japan to Devil’s Slide, Utah, and in 1926, they gave birth to a girl, Sumiko, who would later make significant strides in the health sciences at the University of Utah.
Sumiko Fujiki studied nursing at the University of Utah and graduated in 1949. Soon after graduating, she began teaching at the Thomas D. Dee Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in Ogden. As one of the first to receive a federal grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, she then studied for her Master’s degree in Psychiatric Nursing at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. For a brief amount of time, she also taught at this university.
In 1957, Fujiki returned to her home state because the University of Utah recruited her to create and direct a brand new Master’s program in Psychiatric Nursing. This program was federally funded and was the first graduate program at the university. Fujiki’s main assignment within the first year of the Psychiatric Nursing program was to work with other faculty to create a curriculum that would become the outline for the general graduate program at the College of Nursing. Four students enrolled in the program the first year. Fujiki was the director of this program until the mid 1970’s. She also was tasked with recruiting students into the program for Fall of 1958.
In 1976, Sumiko Fujiki became Dr. Fujiki when she earned her PhD in Education from the University of Utah. She died in 2001. She was widely respected in the field throughout the country and is remembered as a pioneer in psychosocial nursing education in the state of Utah.
-Explore the College of Nursing digital collection
-Visit our History of the College of Nursing digital exhibit
Images courtesy of Historical Collections, Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah.
