Winner of the Isabel McIsaac Memorial Scholarship, NEF's top master's award, Shelley Lynch is a critical care nurse with a passion for travel. As an undergraduate at Hartwick College, she studied transcultural nursing in the rural outposts of Jamaica where she delivered a baby in a rusty tin shack, found an STD in a five-year-old during a well child visit, and treated hypertension with herbal remedies.

Following graduation, she completed numerous advanced training programs, becoming certified in basic and advanced life support, cardiac life support, trauma nursing and, in 2004, was certified as a legal nurse consultant. From 2000 to 2007, she was a travel nurse with American Mobile Healthcare, working in intensive care units in major hospitals throughout the country. She also went to Sri Lanka with Project Hope following the 2004 tsunami and is organizing a visit to Central Africa by a group of nurses who will volunteer in an AIDS clinic.

Currently, Shelley Lynch is working on her Master's in Nursing Education at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix and is an ICU nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She is a writer and editor of continuing education materials for RN.com. Once she has her master's, she intends to become a family nurse practitioner and then go on for her.

PhD. Her most important goal, she writes, "is to never lose my passion for nursing. . . . I need to learn, teach, grow, help, inspire and educate."