Ann Burgess on Starting a Family, Beginning a Career
  Ann Burgess     Biography    
Recorded: 29 Apr 2005

I don’t think we ever competed because we came to Madison because [he] had a job as an assistant professor here. I came here without any job. When we were going through the process of looking for positions, I had the attitude that we’d go wherever Dick got a good job and I’d find the best thing I could. I wasn’t even sure exactly what I wanted. I mean, I did have the idea that I wanted to have children. I did want to have a career. I wasn’t quite sure how this was all going to work out. As it turns out it did work out very well.

The other thing though—he was famous already when we were undergoing this and I certainly wasn’t. So it made a lot of sense—at that time I wasn’t really trying to strive and get the most prestigious position I could. I was in a different mental state, I think, right then. I wanted to go where Dick went. Nowadays there are so many women who have careers that might even be in a different state than their husbands and they carry on long distance. I think that’s fine, but I didn’t want that.

Ann Burgess is the Director Emeritus of the Biology Core Curriculum. She earned her B.S. in chemistry from UW-Madison and her Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University. She was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1987 to 2002.

Biology Core Curriculum is four semester intercollege honors program that provides a broad and integrated background for students interested in any field of biological science. She is interested in undergraduate science education with a particular accent on laboratory and filed experiences that absorb students in process of science.

Ann Burgess is running in several UW-Madison and national efforts to advance science education, including the BioQUEST Consortium and the National Institute of Science Education's College Level One team.