Professor of Biology and Pearson author Ken Miller joins us during Teacher Appreciation Week as #WeThankTeachers

“I started college my freshman year knowing I wanted to be a biologist – I thought that biology was the scientific field with the greatest number of unanswered questions – but I wasn’t sure what kind of biologist I would be. All that changed in my sophomore year when I took a course in Cell Biology with Professor Elizabeth Leduc.

“Dukie,” as she demanded her students call her, was one of the founding mothers of the field, and an absolute master of electron microscopy.  Her lectures were unlike any I had heard before, combining a love of the field, an esthetic sense of the beauty of the living cell, and a determination to provoke curiosity in her students. It worked. Before long I was begging to learn the techniques she applied with such skill, and, almost without knowing it, I became a cell biologist myself.

Elizabeth Leduc was a pioneer, a scientific leader at a time when the field contained very few women, and an inspiration to everyone she mentored or taught. “Dukie” taught me a great deal about science, but just as importantly, she taught me to love the beauty and the mystery that lies at the very heart of life itself, the living cell.”