Marguerite Butler

Dr. Marguerite Butler, Department of Biology, teaches towards quantitative competency to demonstrate how small gains in skills translate into meaningful advances in scientific accomplishment. She encourages students to embrace abstraction, reasoning, and critical evaluation of ideas. Rather than featuring exams, a long-term practice in her lecture courses has been the infusion of authentic research, a practice more recently and widely formalized as CURE: a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience. Students report: “Professor Butler asked us to question everything, to find the beauty and wonder in the most simple of biological systems.” And “I would seek to amaze her.” Students work on independently created projects and individual discoveries are followed by collaborative, community-building discussions. Here those who have been cultured to speak first must learn to listen and reflect, those at ease in listening must learn to share. “Good teachers exude the love they have for the subject they teach, to offer students an opportunity to fall as in love with the subject as they have, as Dr. Butler has done so beautifully.”