She’s baaaack…

January 28, 2009

By hammersmith

Florida sea turtle

It was about 15 years ago, and we hadn’t figured out yet exactly what we could make of the Flinn Scholarship’s travel component.

Then–if these distant memories are accurate–we saw Ruth Allard‘s (’90) slideshow from her trip to Costa Rica, where she’d done some conservation work for a summer. (Or maybe she’d been gone a whole year? Whichever.)

In a matter of minutes, all kinds of things opened up for us: Where Flinn travel might lead, what we might do, how it might impact our future…

In Ruth’s case, that ultimately meant a master’s degree in Environmental Management from Duke, where she studied the impacts of coastal restoration on sea-turtle nesting, then a 10-year stint at the Association of Zoos & Aquariums in Maryland.

After all that time, now Ruth is now back in Arizona. In October, she joined the staff of the Phoenix Zoo, where she serves as its executive vice president of conservation & education. Sounds like just the right place to land, we think, for somebody so good at inspiring the young’uns…


Photo by Flickr user mmahaffie. Used under a Creative Commons license