Dr. Lucy D. Willis, director, School of Nursing, in her new office in the Health Sciences Building.

Bio/Historical Note: Dr. Lucy Dorothea Willis was born in 1918 and raised in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Her initial training at Toronto Western Hospital as a nurse stimulated a lifelong dedication to nursing education. After a post-RN Certificate in Teaching at UBC and six years of nursing and education work at Saskatoon's City Hospital, Dr. Willis joined the faculty of the School of Nursing at the University of Saskatchewan, where she remained until her retirement in 1984. In the 1950s she spent two scholarship years at Columbia University in New York City before earning a prestigious PhD in Education at UC Berkeley in 1967. Dr. Willis was the first Saskatchewan nurse to obtain a doctorate, and only the second in all of Canada. In 1969 she became the School's third director, and was largely responsible for its 1973 conversion to the College of Nursing and for the development of its post-RN education programs. She remained active in retirement, and in 1988 she published Fifty Years: Just the Beginning, a history of nursing education in Saskatchewan. Dr. Willis died in 2018 in Saskatoon at age 99.