By Peter Niewiarowski '84

When I came to Marlboro in 1979, I didn’t even know what Biology was. Then I took a class from Bob Engel, and I never looked back. I heard somebody say recently that Bob was a master teacher. It’s a massive understatement. He was a deeply and naturally gifted teacher. He blended brilliance, passion, empathy, comedy, and curiosity into every meeting, class or otherwise, that I had with him. As a mentor to me during the stages of my plan of concentration, he treated me as a colleague by critiquing my ideas. But he also nurtured me by always displaying his confidence in me and in the notion that I could make a substantive contribution to our knowledge about the world. I saw him do this with all his students, and it is clear he built a legacy on it. Bob and his co-conspirator John Hayes were chief architects (helped by other faculty and student sidekicks) of the academic climate that pervaded the science building. They were at once playful, serious, pranksterish, rigorous, humble, and opinionated. When I left Marlboro, I came to understand that this academic environment was uniquely Marlboro …an environment that Bob built, but one that also built Bob. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been quite accidentally drawn in to it.