Laura Kessel will tell you she just wanted to work. She started babysitting and helping at her uncle's convenience store around age 12, grew up in Cutler, graduated from Trico in 2003, and has not slowed down since. Today she holds three simultaneous positions at the SIU School of Medicine in Springfield: Executive Director of Telehealth Services, Administrative Director for the Office of the Executive Associate Dean, and — since November, on a temporary basis — Acting Department Administrator for Neurology. She has offices in both Springfield and Canton, where she lives. She moves between them as needed. This is, apparently, how she prefers it.

The thread that runs through her entire career traces back to a Trico program she still talks about with obvious affection: the work co-op, a senior-year option that let her spend mornings at a job and afternoons in school. The teacher who ran it, Kathy Hammel, helped Laura land a position at the County Journal — a local paper she had already been calling, repeatedly, until they finally hired her. Over the next three and a half years, split between high school and her time at SIU Carbondale, she did a little of everything there. She delivered papers in the middle of the night. She sold ads. She took photographs, wrote stories, created advertisements, and helped with bookkeeping. "If someone was on vacation, I filled in," she says. Jerry, Larry, and Dorothy Willis ran the paper and gave her room to learn every corner of the operation. "I think those programs are undervalued," she says of work co-op, "and I wish they were offered in more places."

From Trico, she enrolled at Western Kentucky University for photojournalism, then realized it was the people in the photographs — not the camera — that interested her. She switched to social work, transferred to SIU Carbondale to be closer to her ailing father, and graduated. Then, on a last-minute impulse, she applied to the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis — one of the top two programs in the country — and was accepted in late July and started in mid-August. She earned her master's in 2009 with a focus on social and economic development and a management specialization.

The jobs that followed were varied by design. She worked as a community organizer for the Illinois Coalition for Community Services, covering five southern Illinois counties — Randolph, Perry, Jackson, Johnson, and Union — running food programs, youth programming, and after-school initiatives. From there, she moved to Springfield as a policy analyst for Rural Affairs under Lieutenant Governor Sheila Simon, staffing the Governor's Rural Affairs Council and working on issues from rural EMS funding to making SNAP benefits accessible at farmers' markets. She then spent a year and a half as a principal consultant at the Illinois State Board of Education, reviewing grants and contracts — steady work that gave her time to care for her father, who was terminally ill and had moved in with her and her husband.

After her father passed, she was ready to move again. She joined the SIU School of Medicine in November 2014 as Assistant Director of Regional Medical Programs and Rural Health, covering 20 counties in western Illinois — connecting physicians with rural communities, running health career exploration programs for high school students, and helping communities understand the full range of healthcare careers available to them. In 2019, she moved into telehealth. Eight or nine months later, the pandemic hit. When most people were sheltering at home, Laura moved into a hotel in Springfield for two weeks so she could be at the office for long days. "I didn't swim," she says, "but at least I kept my head above water." She was promoted to Executive Director a few years later.

She also serves on the board of Rural Partners, the state's rural development council, and has been a Fulton County Board member for nearly nine years — currently chairing the property committee. At home in Canton, she and her husband, Andrew Thornton, are raising her two nephews, Vernon and Graisen, now 14 and 16, who have lived with them since they were small. Her motto, offered without hesitation: "I just want to leave the world better than I found it." For someone juggling three job titles, a county board seat, and two teenagers, she is clearly serious about trying.