Woman in Power: Meet Lynnette Watkins, President of Cooley Dickinson

Written by Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner

Sponsored by Valley Home Improvement

Published in Northampton Living (September 2023)

For Lynnette Watkins, the hospital has always been home. As a young girl in St. Louis, Missouri, it was where her dad spent most weekends, visiting his patients and building his ophthalmology practice. When he had to perform cataract surgery, his little girl was entrusted to the nurses, who’d fill her with candy and lollipops to her heart’s content.
As a teenager, she worked as a candy striper in the same hospital, where she gathered bouquets at the flower shop and carted them to grateful patients’ rooms.

Now the president and chief executive officer of Cooley Dickinson Health Care, Watkins beams when she recalls her early days. “I still have a picture of me with my little hat and my candy striper outfit,” she says. “I just thought I was the bee’s knees.”

She had no doubt she would be a doctor: At home, she spent her free time in the basement, a dark space lit only by a projector that made movies of her dad’s multiple-day surgeries.

Following medical school at the University of Missouri, Watkins boldly declared a specialty dominated by white men. She made ophthalmology look enviably easy, as she rounded in pumps, flashed her radiant smile (accented with a hint of lipstick), and raised a daughter while she worked 80-hour weeks.

After working in private practice for 10 years, she went on to serve as chief medical officer for hospital systems in 3 states. And when she arrived in Northampton 2 years ago, it wasn’t long before Cooley Dickinson felt like home.

Watkins always wanted to be a career woman, and her father, one of the first African-American ophthalmologists in St. Louis, had instilled in her a responsibility to give back. She had watched him practice medicine – and insist on kindness – amidst withering racism. But it was an enormous undertaking, to be a doctor, a mother, an African-American and a woman. So this was her mantra: Show up, work hard, do well. Repeat ad infinitum.

She never dreamed she would get married, though her parents fell in love at first sight in high school chemistry class. That’s the man, her mother told herself when she spotted Garey, and that was that. When her father joined the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity in college, her mother, who would go on to be a teacher, was named the illustrious “Kappa sweetheart.”

“My dad’s probably got the photo of her with her sweetheart ribbon and the crown,” says Watkins, “surrounded by all of those Kappas, and my dad who is just cheesing.” She grins broadly at the thought. These old images she’s mentioned – of her as a candy striper and her parents as sweethearts – elicit pure joy. So does the present picture of her and her husband.

During our photo shoot, they are lovely; they are in love. One day they both signed up for Facebook Dating. That’s the man, she told herself when she read his profile. Then she hit “Like,” and that was that.

“We have a love of jazz and travel, and, food, food, food,” says Watkins. Ed Sackett, a Presbyterian minister and photojournalist, is also a formidable cook.

“[Her daughter] Joy and Lynnette’s mother were both very aggressive in telling me, ‘Don’t let Lynnette in the kitchen,’” says Sackett. “She can reconstruct your face. But boiling water is off-limits.” They both laugh. “But when she wants people to show up to a meeting, she says I’m the secret weapon. The smoker gets fired up, a little brisket, some beef ribs, some sausage …”

Their goldendoodle Ella Peaches, who has been listening politely, seems to be watering at the mouth. Or maybe she’s just grinning.

Sackett and Watkins both care deeply about community. As a disaster relief worker in Texas following Hurricane Harvey, he helped people rebuild their lives – while working with refugees and asylum seekers to transform theirs.

Watkins, the first female president and the second Black president at Mass General Brigham, is proud of the hospital’s United Against Racism initiative, which includes mandatory education around systemic racism and institutional bias; their Oxbow Clinic, the only LGBTQ+ clinic within the hospital system; and the new emergency department, unveiled in July to celebrate Cooley Dickinson’s 10-year anniversary as part of Mass General Brigham.  

Her mantra is still the same. “It’s part of the role, it’s part of the responsibility, it’s part of being an African-American professional,” she says. “We have to do better, we have to work harder, and we have to make it easier for those that look like us, that look like me, to have the opportunity to serve in these roles. You can see it as a burden or an obligation; I see it as an opportunity. I tend to be a glass half-full type of person.”