Thérèse “Tracy” Dill

Sister Thérèse (Tracy) Dill entered the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur on September 12, 1965 at Ilchester, Maryland.

“The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur were a total, wonderful surprise in my life!” she says. As the third of Alma and Irving Dill’s four children, she was to be meant by the Sisters of Mercy as had several generations of the women in her mother’s family in Georgia. But Mt. St. Agnes High School in Baltimore was closing so instead she enrolled in Maryvale.

“My interest in all things scientific was encouraged, Julie Billiart’s life and mission challenged me, I first read Teilhard de Chardin, and the Catholic faith, so alive in my parents, became my own,” she recalls.

The surprises kept coming. As a novice Sister Tracy taught middle school at Little Flower School in Great Mills, Maryland, where she fell in “love” with teaching, doing it well and keeping the students at its heart. Science and science education became her a lifetime passion. After completing a Biology degree at Trinity College, Sister Tracy returned to middle school science classrooms, mostly in Brooklyn, New York, where the diversity of cultures and languages in the school and parish was a challenge and a blessing that she holds dear to this day.

Since receiving master’s and doctoral degrees in Biology from the University of Maryland, Sister Tracy has had the privilege of being teacher, advisor and mentor to undergraduate and graduate students for almost 30 years at the University of Maryland, Notre Dame of Maryland University and Loyola College Maryland. “The greatest challenge is often helping students to understand that science is an active, ongoing way of knowing their world; a world dominated by what science has wrought,” she says.

Sister Tracy firmly believes that being a part of someone’s learning is a profound privilege. “I am grateful to my students for their trust in me and for all that they have taught me,” she says. “The broad, steady shoulders of my family, the Sisters in Notre Dame and my many teachers, colleagues and mentors have given me the firm ground upon which to build. They have been a joy and always a surprise!”

Updated in 2025