Meet a Fellow PWLE
Getting to Know Laura
Quiet water runs deep. A retired kindergarten teacher and reading specialist, Laura listens carefully, asks the practical question nobody else thought of, and lives by a simple rule: movement is medicine.
If you ask Laura what made her happy today, she won’t lead with her advocacy work. She’ll tell you about yoga class. “I have arthritis from neck to toe,” she says, “and my yoga class brings me great joy three mornings a week, because I can work on trying to be flexible and strong and balanced, and I hear the most beautiful music that I bring home and play later. I just really feel good about trying to address my arthritis issues with non-medicine and with movement.”
Movement is her medicine. It’s worth holding onto that phrase, because it tells you something about how Laura approaches everything — pain, research, mentorship, conversation. Gently. With intention. And with the patience to let things work over time.
Living with arthritis, in her own words
Laura’s pain comes from arthritis. She’s clear about something many of us recognize: a single number on a zero-to-ten scale doesn’t begin to capture it. “Right now, I’m sitting in a chair and I’m quite comfortable,” she says, “but if I get up and move around, my pain is different. If I have sat in the car for several hours, my pain is different. It’s different from morning to noon to night.” Weather, diet, mood — all of it shifts the picture.
That’s part of why she’ll quietly get up and stretch in the middle of a Zoom call with her mentee, and why one of her early suggestions for the K12 summer program was simply: build in time to move. “This is a pain conference,” she says, “and you’re forcing us to sit still for hours on end.” If you’ve ever felt the same and didn’t say anything, Laura is the kind of teammate who will say it for you.
“Movement is my medicine.”
How she got here
Before any of this, Laura was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher, and then a Reading Recovery specialist — an intensive one-on-one program that gave her fifteen weeks to bring a struggling first grader up to grade level. She loved the work. (She also developed a stiff neck from always sitting with her student on her left, which is, fittingly, how she found her way to yoga.) She’s a University of Michigan graduate, and years later it was University of Michigan Health Research that pulled her back into a different kind of classroom.
Messages started arriving inviting her to join clinical studies. “I was at a point in my life where I had more time,” she remembers, “and I thought, I feel like I’m a relatively healthy person, and I’m going to dip my toe in here.” She volunteered for everything — osteoarthritis, migraines, even studies that had nothing to do with her at all. Then came a four-month study with biweekly trips to Ann Arbor, and a research manager who noticed something: Laura always asked questions. At the end of the study, she invited Laura to join an advisory committee. Laura asked “why her.” The answer was simple — because you’re paying attention.
How she works (and what helps)
If you’re going to be on a project with Laura, here are a few things worth knowing. She describes herself, with characteristic precision, as “more of the slow cooker than the microwave.” She likes time to think. She prefers small Zoom groups to a gallery of thirty researchers. She’s often more comfortable following up with a thoughtful email after the meeting than firing off a reaction in real time.
That can read as quiet. It isn’t. Ask her what strength she brings to a team that might not be obvious at first, and she’ll say she’s a good listener — and that if you give her a moment, she can put together a clear paragraph or two on almost anything. She credits the teaching. The rest of us can recognize it as something rarer: she waits until a question actually needs to be asked, and then she asks it well.
She also names something that helps her speak up, and it’s a useful thing for all of us to remember about each other. “What helps,” she says, “is when someone specifically says, well, Laura, what do you think about this? That invitation makes it all the easier to give an opinion or express your question.” If you’re in a meeting with Laura — or with any PWLE who’s holding back — that direct invitation is a gift you can give.
What “meaningful engagement” looks like
Laura’s relationship with her K12 mentee is, by several accounts in our group, a model worth copying. When she describes what makes it work, the answer is concrete:
- He sends the agenda before the meeting and asks if there’s anything she’d like to add.
- The next meeting gets scheduled before the current one ends.
- When he’s drafting a manuscript or training script, it goes out to the whole group as a living document everyone can edit.
- When people disagree, he listens — clinicians, PWLEs, athletic trainers, pain psychologists — and even when he won’t ultimately adopt a suggestion, he names what was useful about it.
“He never promises that he’s going to necessarily adopt it,” Laura says, “but he always is appreciative and acknowledges that you shared something. That, in and of itself, is important.” That kind of acknowledgment, she says, “makes me feel like I’m a person of value.”
It’s a useful checklist — whether you’re a PWLE wondering what to ask for from researchers, or a researcher wondering where to start.
Outside work
Laura grew up in a family where her father didn’t draw lines between what boys and girls did. If he was learning golf, the kids were learning golf. The family story she tells: he sat the three kids down one night and asked whether they’d rather have a pool or a basketball court. All three voted for the pool. He installed a basketball court — and it turned out to be the right call. The backyard became the neighborhood backyard, big enough for volleyball, badminton, and what was effectively pickleball before pickleball had a name.
She’s still a golfer. She and her husband Terry have grandchildren whose seasons run on baseball, soccer, flag football, and golf, and she loves that Michigan’s seasons keep the calendar changing. She plays music for hours every day. She’s a voracious reader — partial to romantic comedies and women’s fiction, but she also loved The Boys in the Boat and Project Hail Mary. Her favorite piece of music is Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade — partly for the music, and partly for the story underneath: a woman whose father valued her education enough to make her mesmerizing.
She introduced her grandsons to Peter and the Wolf when they were small, so they could hear how a sound could become an animal. It’s the same instinct that made her a good kindergarten teacher, and the same instinct that makes her a good advocate: trust people with the right materials, and they’ll find their own way in.
“I’m not just experiencing this life. I’m changing it. I’m being part of maybe making it a tiny bit better.”
Why does she do it
Asked what keeps her going in work that can be slow, awkward, and quietly thankless, Laura points to gratitude. “I feel really grateful for the genes that my ancestors passed down to me,” she says. “I’m very blessed with my health and my family. If I’m going to be a healthy person, I should do something with that, so that I’m not just experiencing this life. I’m changing it. I’m being part of maybe making it a tiny bit better.”
Five years from now, she hopes our PWLE voices are stronger, and our group is more diverse — more racial and ethnic diversity, more age diversity, more of the middle generation that’s currently underrepresented. And she hopes patient engagement becomes so embedded in research that no one has to argue for it anymore. “I would like to think it just becomes the natural order of things.”
In the meantime, you can usually find her in yoga class three mornings a week, listening for the music she’ll bring home.
If you’d like to contact Laura
She’s a good person to ask about: the patient-advisor experience on advisory committees, what good mentorship looks like in practice, managing arthritis pain through movement, or simply how to find your voice in a room of researchers. And if you’re new to the group and haven’t said much yet, she’ll be the first to make space for you.