Awards

This year our Club’s Woman of Achievement is Lesley Smith.  Nominated by Kay Meyer and Pam Malzbender, Lesley Smith spent nearly 30 years as a scientist and educator at the University of Colorado and last November she was elected to represent HD 49 in CO House of Representatives. One of our nominators describes Lesley as "a practical, hard-working woman who simply gets things done."  

Smith graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara, and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. While writing her dissertation, she became the first woman aquanaut in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s underwater research habitat, Aquarius. Only a few women worked at the University of Maryland’s marine labs, and Smith was the only one selected to join the aquanaut team, where she lived underwater and conducted research on coral reefs for a week. Her CU career began in 1989 with a Visiting Scientist Fellowship at CU Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES). She loved working in the field as a research scientist, but also wanted to share the joy of inquiry-based scientific exploration and discovery with students. She taught an intensive, three-week Lake and Stream Ecology field class at CU’s Mountain Research Station for 10 summers.