BWS has a doctor on our board of directors. We also have a nurse. And she is the same person. Lynne Ray holds a Doctorate in Nursing degree from the University of Washington. If you know Lynne, this may not come as a shock. She is astute and radiates competence. She is also modest. After she joined BWS and attended a handful of meetings, we invited her to join the board. She said she would be willing, but she wasn’t sure what she might have to offer.
This is even funnier when you look at what an integral part of BWS she has become. She is Vice President and has the Communications portfolio. This includes running our
website, our Facebook page, and all the other social media a modern organization needs to have. She manages, creates, and gathers, all the content that makes these platforms informative and engaging. Lynne is also an accomplished photographer, and her photos are a large a part of the content we display.
In addition to Communications, Lynne is volunteer coordinator for the many of the community events that we participate in. She is part of the 6-PPDQ sampling
we do, and is on the Data Committee, and pretty much any ad hoc committee that happens to be created. But perhaps the most important contribution Lynne has made to
BWS is her scientific experience and expertise. BWS members are all, mostly, geeky nature enthusiasts. We love the mantle of ‘citizen scientist’ and we love collecting data. We are
good at it. We are careful and we diligently follow standardized protocols. However, none of us on the board, except for Lynne, are scientists. Lynne has done scientific –
research professionally. She has taught graduate students and overseen their research projects.
BWS members tend to be ambitious and enthusiastic about any new project that comes along. Our default response tends to be “Yeah! Let’s do that!”. Lynne has taught us to stop and consider what questions this new project might answer. Are the data we collect in this new project going to be useful to our research goals? Will it be worth the resources it will require? Will it add to the BWS mission? Will it add to our knowledge of aquifers and water supply?
It turns out that cool projects are sometimes not all that practical. While we might want to do all the projects we come across, it’s always wise to follow the doctor’s orders.
