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When University of Virginia nursing students visit associate professor Beth Quatrara’s office, a Labrador retriever is likely to greet them.

During the fall semester, a black lab puppy named Woody nestled inside a crate in Quatrara’s office in McLeod Hall. In addition to directing graduate nursing programs, teaching, and providing clinical care, Quatrara helps raise puppies for future service work. Once the puppies turn a year old, they transition to more specialized trainers who prepare them to become service animals.

“I’ve gotten smart, so now I pick them up over the summer when things aren’t as busy and I can get them potty-trained before the first day of classes,” Quatrara said.

Having puppies present is one of the many ways students said Quatrara helped them feel welcome at the University.

Early in her first semester, when Sarah Beth Long was taking Quatrara’s pathophysiology course, the professor brought in a puppy she was training. Immediately, Long, a dual-track clinical nurse specialist and nurse practitioner in the Master of Science in Nursing program, felt at ease.

“It was bringing Beth not the professor, but the person, into the class,” Long said. “It just brings a homey feeling.”

Quatrara can reach her students because she was once in their shoes. She earned her master’s in nursing and her doctorate in nursing practice from UVA. But before moving in 1993 to be a nurse at UVA Health, she received a prediction.

“You’re going to love it here,” her relative, a nurse working in UVA Health, told her.

Her relative was right. After more than three decades at UVA, Quatrara said she loves her work and her students.

“I very much value my DNP degree,” Quatrara said. “That’s my biggest diploma there on the wall from UVA, and I was in that first class of DNP students. And I am incredibly proud of our current DNP students.”

One of those students, E.J. Rauch first met Quatrara as he was applying to UVA for nursing school.

“She’s truly passionate about teaching,” Rauch, a U.S. Army captain from San Antonio, said. “She thinks about how to reach the students who are struggling, not just the students who are already crushing it.”

He said Quatrara also considers how a student’s personal life might affect their academic work. Rauch was one of those students who needed more support.

“When I came here, I told them, ‘My wife is pregnant and she’s due in the middle of the school year,’” Rauch recalled. “The beginning of the spring semester, she ensured that I was accommodated without undermining my studies at all.”

Rauch and Long, a U.S. Air Force officer, each said Quatrara goes out of her way to support students who are in the military. On Veterans Day, she hosts lunches for military students. When students receive promotions, she acknowledges them with a ceremony.

“If someone is at a base and they’re being promoted, it’s a big ceremony, and they get to put their uniforms on, and there’s pinning of their new regalia and patches that are placed. If they get promoted while they’re here in school, there’s typically little to no recognition of that, and that’s a huge moment in their lives, so we’ve started celebrating that,” Quatrara said.

Besides recognizing military students’ accomplishments, the celebration has helped Long find a sense of community.

“I’ve been to almost every single one, and it’s fun to get to the know the other students also. I didn’t know other Air Force students because they’re all in the DNP program, but we’re all Air Force, and she has this way of bringing us together,” Long said.

Rauch said Quatrara helped him find his passion as a nurse. When he came to UVA, he was interested in pursuing a doctoral project on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a form of life support used on patients with heart and lung conditions. She encouraged him to pursue it, though he said he would have happily done any project that fulfilled his graduation requirements. She suggested he pursue a project on ECMO and CPR, which related to his specialties before he started at UVA.

“She didn’t dismiss my curiosity. It’s inspired me to do the same thing as an entry-level Army leader,” Rauch said. “She’s just an entity of encouragement.”

For Quatrara, teaching is a reward in itself. She loves the moment when the course material starts to click for students.

“My favorite part is watching the lights go on,” she said. “I’m one of the first faculty students meet. When you can see them start to understand, and they’re smiling, those are the moments that matter.”