Using games to engage her students, Sulzman tried to energize her classes, subject

“Love is a better teacher than duty,” said Albert Einstein. Elizabeth W. Sulzman, an award-winning associate professor at Oregon State University, was the embodiment of the love that teaches well, according to her students, colleagues and friends.

“She had more energy than you can imagine,” said Barbara Bond, a friend and colleague. “She was gorgeous and vivacious.”

It seemed that everyone who knew her was shocked and devastated when Sulzman died suddenly Sunday, apparently after purposely ingesting a lethal chemical. She was 40 years old.

The words that spilled from friends and colleagues as they struggled to deal with her death were about how infectious her love of learning was, how much she accomplished as a teacher and scientist, and how her spirit will live on, perhaps in incalculable ways.

Sulzman’s talent as a teacher was for engaging students in the excitement of learning, specifically about soil science — not exactly the sexiest academic subject. Sulzman taught the introductory class, in the Crop and Soil Science Department in the College of Agricultural Sciences, twice a year.

“She was doing fascinating and innovative things,” said department head Russell Karow.

She used games to get her students’ intellectual and competitive juices flowing.

“I have experienced (and highly recommend!) the joy of watching 25 college students fight over first-place ribbons,” Sulzman wrote in a statement of her philosophy, “following a rousing game of ‘Soils Jeopardy.’”

Sulzman was known for learning the names of every one of her 60 to 90 students within the first two weeks of a semester.

“She put so much into this class,” one student wrote in a teacher evaluation, “it made people want to work hard.”

Unlike most of her department, the majority of Sulzman’s time was devoted to teaching rather than research. And she loved that. Karow said Sulzman had a following of graduate students who wanted to be teachers because they were inspired by her.

“Selfishly, one of the things we as a department found was there were a good number of students transferring out of other disciplines,” Karow said.

In 2005, Sulzman won the R.M. Wade Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Agricultural Sciences at OSU. In 2006, she was a recipient of OSU’s Faculty Teaching Excellence Award.

“She was a shining and rapidly rising star as a young faculty member,” said Associate Dean Stella Coakley.

OSU recently nominated her for a national teaching award given by the Council for the Advancement of Education and the Carnegie Institute. Sulzman resisted having her name put forward at first, said Luanne Lawrence, vice-president of university advancement.

“She was so humble and honored to be nominated,” Lawrence said.

Teaching was not her only talent.

Born in Pennsylvania, Sulzman graduated from Yale University in 1988 with a degree in biology. Before moving on to graduate work, Sulzman went to the Central African Republics with the Peace Corps in 1988 and 1989 as part of the agriculture program. She completed her master of science degree in 1992 and her doctorate in 2000, both in ecology at Colorado State University. She was a post-doctoral research associate at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biogeochemie, in Jena, Germany, in 2000. Then she came to OSU.

She was engaged in research at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene, where she was working to gain an understanding of a small basin ecosystem. She published numerous articles and was well-known in both national and international academic circles.

It is a field largely dominated by men. According to friend and colleague Bond, that was never an issue for Sulzman. That was one of the things she liked most about Sulzman.

“We talked about helping our daughters be strong,” Bond said, “and helping our female students have self-confidence.”

But never about how men had an advantage over them.

“Academically and physically, Elizabeth Sulzman could put almost any man to shame,” Bond said. “They knew that.”

It was an attitude toward life that Sulzman and her husband, James, passed on to their 8-year-old daughter, Serita, Bond said.

“She’s a little firecracker,” Bond said. “With a go-for-it attitude. And gorgeous.”

Sulzman loved being outdoors, running, hiking and telemark skiing. She had just turned 40, and to celebrate she ran a marathon, one of many she had run in her life.

Her sparkling personality and her larger-than-life energy made it all the harder for friends, students and colleagues to comprehend her loss.

“We all knew her in different dimensions,”Coakley said, “but we were all equally shocked and surprised.”

Bond said she talked to a mutual friend Tuesday morning who was struggling to cope with the news.

“‘But I’ve always been the one who cried on her shoulder,’” Bond said was the friend’s reaction. “She’s always been the one who listens to others.”

Family members are still considering when to have a public memorial for Sulzman. But her legacy is not in doubt.

“Elizabeth was a wonderful professor,” one student wrote to the Gazette-Times. “Her classes were very interactive and she created a fun learning environment.”

“She will be missed,” another student wrote.

“Dr. Sulzman is one of the few teachers that challenged me,” said yet another.

If a teacher’s eternal light shines in her students, “She lit a lot of flames,” Coakley said. And the same is true of the teachers who will teach differently and better because they knew her.

“I loved that woman,” said Bond, “I loved her and admire her.”

She had trouble remembering to talk about her friend in the past tense.