2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In an increasingly competitive global economy, STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and math, are recognized as critical to the future economic prosperity of the United States. Building a more inclusive STEM pipeline, from K-12 and in higher education, has been a priority in US higher education for two and a half decades. Despite all of these efforts, nursing typically is not invited to be part of the STEM effort. Why not? Nurses clearly use and create technology. Nursing science is a robust field of academic scholarship. And nursing, like engineering, is a profession focused on caring for the health, safety, and welfare of the public. Recognizing Nursing Is STEM (NIS) is the policy objective of the NIS Coalition. To raise awareness of NISC within engineering, and to highlight collaboration among the professions of nursing and engineering, a systematic review of the ASEE PEER database and the IEEE Explore database were performed. A total of 35 peer reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria for this review, and the themes of these articles were mapped to a recent literature review of nursing and engineering, which was published in the nursing literature. The results of this study highlight that systematic reviews of convergent areas – such as nursing + engineering – may be prone to the error of omitting important articles for inclusion because of the differences in discipline-specific literature. The results of this study support the importance of educational collaborations among teams of engineers and teams of nurses, as well as highlights that nursing+engineering is an important area for communicating between the professions as well as facilitating the communication of the professions with the public. Collectively, the weight of evidence of the literature identified in systematic reviews supports the inclusion of nursing in STEM.