In 1973, Dr. Marjory Gordon, along with other nursing leaders, embarked on an effort to capture nursing’s phenomena of concern, name and define theses phenomena and develop a framework that has help to inform nursing knowledge, the Standards of Nursing Practice, nursing curricula, clinical research and ultimately the scope of professional nursing practice, internationally. The advancement of the nursing diagnosis movement across North America and later the world (NANDA-I) along with the development of a framework to guide nursing assessment, namely the Eleven Functional Health Patterns, have distinguished Dr. Gordon’s contributions to the discipline. For this profound work, and more importantly for her personal leadership and dedication to The Marjory Gordon Program for Knowledge Development and Clinical Reasoning was established. Within this program, The International Gordon Fellows Program has been established to promote the continued advancement of nursing knowledge about patients' response to illness, clinical reasoning and decision making and patient care delivery.