Staff Spotlight: Dan White — Laboratory Director

Published on: June 30, 2026

Across Cape Cod, clean drinking water depends on work most residents never see. As Director of the Water Quality Laboratory, Dan White oversees the operations behind that work — managing a staff of 14 full and part-time employees, plus three seasonal laboratory assistants, to ensure the timely testing of samples and production of reports for residents, businesses, and water departments across the region.

The role goes well beyond the bench. Dan is responsible for maintaining the laboratory’s certification with the State and submitting regulatory compliance testing results for many of the Cape’s Public Water Suppliers, while also ensuring proper quality control and safety practices are maintained throughout the lab. Dan prepares the laboratory’s annual budget, including supply and capital items that address changing water quality monitoring needs, and oversees expenditures, purchase orders, and account balances.

No two days look alike. Dan’s schedule might include reviewing reports, meeting with potential clients, fixing lab equipment, evaluating staff performance, putting together a competitive bid for new equipment, uploading data to the State’s data portal, troubleshooting changes to the lab’s computer system, notifying a client about a maximum contaminant level exceedance in their drinking water, speaking with residents about their concerns, leading a staff meeting, or attending a webinar on emerging contaminants of concern — often all in the same week.

Dan’s path to the Cape began far from Massachusetts. After completing a master’s degree at the State University of New York at Brockport, Dan managed a water quality research lab in upstate New York focused on environmental and ecological research. In 2008, a research position with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole brought Dan to the Cape, managing a seasonal research lab and field team conducting ecological research on arctic lakes in northern Alaska as part of an NSF-funded Long Term Ecological Research program — splitting time between Alaska summers and lab analysis in Woods Hole. That work exposed Dan to the research and conservation happening within Cape Cod’s unique aquatic environment, and in 2019, when the Laboratory Director position opened up, Dan jumped at the chance.

What Dan enjoys most is how tightly the Cape Cod community is tied together by its water resources. With the vast majority of drinking water coming from a sole-source aquifer, and a large number of private wells and septic systems across the region, protecting groundwater is extremely important to public health. Dan values working directly with County residents to address their concerns and analysis needs, and — drawing on a background in biological and ecological research on lakes and streams — has a particular interest in the Cape’s hundreds of kettle ponds, including recent work with APCC to develop methods for testing cyanotoxins in those ponds.

One thing that might surprise people: how much critical work goes into sample handling and report review. If a sample isn’t received and handled correctly at the front desk, the required analysis won’t happen — or won’t be valid. And while running samples through the lab’s instruments is the easy part, results go through extensive quality control, validation, and review before a report can be issued, which is why testing may be complete within days but a final report can take up to two weeks. Behind every report is a team of staff working to make that process possible.

Dan wants residents and community partners to know that the laboratory provides a wide range of cutting-edge analysis for drinking water, wastewater, groundwater, and surface waters — working with municipal, state, and federal regulators, and maintaining an excellent reputation for quality results. A county laboratory is unique in Massachusetts, existing here because of the essential role water quality plays in Cape Cod’s community.