User:Drobertpowell/sandbox/BerthaVazquez

Bertha Vazquez is a middle school science teacher at the George Washington Carver Middle School of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools and the director of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES), a program of the Center for Inquiry and a project of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Education and career
After having reading The Selfish Gene at the age of eighteen and becoming a self-described fan of Richard Dawkins, Vazquez pursued degrees in biology from the University of Miami and in science education from Florida International University. She has been teaching middle school science in Miami-Dade County her since 1990. Although Vazquez's early teaching interest was in environmental education, and she encouraged her fellow teachers even in non-scientific subjects to incorporate climate change in their curricula, she became focused on evolution education.

Vazquez has received national and local honors, including the 2017 Evolution Education Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers, the 2009 Richard C. Bartlett Environmental Education Award, the 1997 and 2008 Miami-Dade Science Teacher of the Year, and she was a 2015 finalist for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

Vazquez has also appeared on the Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World.

TIES
In 2013, she met Dawkins at the University of Miami and discussed evolution education with him. This and the understanding that teachers learn the most from each other inspired her to conduct workshops on evolution for her fellow teachers. Dawkins followed up with a visit to Vazquez's school in 2014 to speak to teachers from the Miami-Dade County school district. This encounter along with the encouragement of Dawkins and Robyn Blumner led to the beginnings, in 2015, of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science. Vazquez sees TIES as not only about evolution education but also about empowering teachers to be leaders in their educational communities.