WAUKESHA – Having taught at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha for 30 years and at other schools for 10 years before that, biologist Carla Keller is ready to leave the grading of exams, papers, and projects to the newer faculty. “It is time for a change,” asserts Keller, who will retire in May, at the end of the academic year.
Originally thinking she would be a high school chemistry teacher, Keller realized when her brother was in high school that she wouldn’t want to deal with that age group. She also fell in love with biology, and just before her junior year in college, her focus switched from one science to another.
When Keller earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from UW-Milwaukee in 1960, the school had no post-graduate program in biology. She got a job doing research in a physiology lab and liked the work. However, when she was asked to teach, she became also an “acting instructor,” equivalent to a graduate teaching assistant. Later, when UW-Milwaukee established a graduate degree, she pursued it and continued teaching there until 1968.
Then moving to Madison, where her husband was working on a Ph.D., she taught first at Holy Name College for two years and at Edgewood College for another year, also traveling to UW-Milwaukee to work on her degree. On being asked in 1971 to join the faculty at the still new UW-Waukesha campus, Keller, who completed her master’s degree that same year, accepted a position and settled in Waukesha.
Still, the itch to learn did not subside. In 1978 she undertook work toward a doctorate, studying thyroid and adrenal glands in rats for her dissertation. Her project ended abruptly in 1984, when all her research materials accidentally were thrown out. She re-directed her efforts from research to recruiting young women to enter the field.
Chosen in 1992 as one of the three initial faculty fellows in a UW System program funded by the National Science Foundation and designed to entice women and minorities to study science, Keller developed a course on the history of women in science. She conducted workshops for other science faculty on making science more user-friendly and counseled students to encourage them to consider science majors. In 1997 she was awarded a UW Colleges Kaplan Fellowship for her ongoing effort to increase women and minority representation in science.
“I had the opportunity to meet wonderful students over the years,” Keller reminisces. “That was the best part, getting to be a brief part of their lives.” Her students have spanned the age spectrum as well, lending depth to the experience. And she believes in the quality of the education she and her colleagues have been dispensing: “Students who have come here and taken their work seriously have not felt short-changed,” she affirms.
Besides the students, Keller will miss the day-to-day contact with the other biologists in her department. “They have been like another family,” she feels. Nancy Dernehl, a colleague at UW-Waukesha, Keller met in the early days of her teaching at UW-Milwaukee. The two have teamed up here to present classes on frogs through the College for Kids program. Keller views that as an enjoyable highlight of her career here.
Keller has been active in student recruitment and is heartened to see the college’s reputation, which lags behind reality, improving. Programs such as the guaranteed transfer and pre-registration advising have helped bring about the change in perception, she believes.
After she retires, Keller will spend more time at a family cottage in Oconto County and probably do some volunteer work at the zoo, the museum, and possibly the Repertory Theater. She also hopes to continue advising, tutoring and interacting with students at UW-Waukesha and would like to return to teach Women and Science course she created.
Carla Keller lives in Waukesha. |
