CWRU Physics Faculty

The truly fulfilling nature of a physics faculty career in teaching and research stems from its depth, breadth, fast-breaking dynamism, and the collaboration of students with the more senior faculty and postdoctoral people. In the case of my physics group and myself, a beginning and steadfast devotion to basic astroparticle physics has been extended to include applied and industrial research where the mathematical techniques honed in basic physics are applied to other problems. More recently, we have also turned our attention to the world of physics education research. With this latest development, the previous involvement of even very young students into our program has meant that they are also contributing to research into improvements of teaching methods used by faculty in their own curriculum!

My basic and applied research programs, broadened as described above, have spanned a time period of more than three decades. An early basic research activity has been theoretical calculations to help plan for new high-energy experiments, especially tests of the electroweak force parameters through the production of weak bosons, the carriers of that force. Such computations can lead to fundamental discoveries themselves, such as our discovery of "radiation symmetry," where radiative weak-boson production exhibits zeros in its angular distributions but only for particular forms of particle interactions. Sensitive tests of new theories are therefore possible, and, remarkably, we have continued to collaborate with experimenters looking for such effects 25 years after our original papers. (The original "radiation zero" has now been seen experimentally!) Other basic research has dwelt upon cosmology (e.g., solutions to cosmic string equations), fluid nonlinear analysis (e.g., stability of solitary waves under large perturbations), and biophysics (e.g., modeling of ion channel diffusion). The principal applied areas are simulations of imaging (dominated by MRI), electromagnetic fields and sources, and electrical sensors, where all manner of electromagnetic numerical recipes and computations (finite elements, finite difference time domain, etc.) are our tools. We have worked for a number of years in the search for ways in which elegant and powerful mathematical tools can be used to solve practical problems, tools such as variational calculus with constraints. In product optimization, a functional, representing, for instance, the inductance of a coil, is minimized in order to switch the coil on and off as quickly as possible, but subject to constraints such as a desire to have a uniform field in a particular region which are implemented by Lagrange multipliers. The emerging lesson is that more and more products in the business world, including financial investment instruments, can be effectively mathematically modeled and their qualities thereby optimized. Again, computations can also lead to fundamental discoveries, such as our discovery of "supershielding," an effective approach to magnetic and electric field confinement. As noted earlier, a new area of research activity for us is physics education research. Two examples that are also subjects of our recent conference presentations (see, for instance, November 2006, The Reinvention Center Conference on "Transforming the Culture: Undergraduate Education and the Multiple Functions of the Research University")are research into what we call a "post-exam syndrome" and the problem of a "teflon education." In the first, we consider the dilemma of students with unresolved difficulties associated with their exam performance and, in the second, we address ways to improve learning retention by novel repetition methods.

The wide range of research - and related teaching activities - outlined above has been possible only because of the many marvelous undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate collaborators who have led much of the work. Practically all of the 150 or so publications, published abstracts, and patents of mine have young co-authors. There are in fact 15 published papers in which undergraduate students were authors or coauthors, and 12 of my undergraduate advisees have won NSF graduate fellowships. There have been 16 Ph.D.s under my advisory, three of my former graduate and postgraduate co-researchers have recently written a substantial (900 page) imaging textbook (letting me be a co-author) as an outgrowth of two decades of industrial MRI work, and two others joined me in receiving a DOE education award for a "chaos-theory" teaching module. It has been estimated that my former graduate and postgraduate students presently hold more than 100 industrial patents. My collaborators' contributions have been pivotal in the six recent national and international conferences and tutorials I have organized or co-organized in the last five years. The involvement by my colleagues and myself in the research and development of more effective teaching models follows an early implementation of new teaching methods. Starting with the 1988 installation of the Case fiber-optics network, I used e-mail, electronic bulletin boards, simulations, and computer movies, supplemented by cooperative learning techniques. This early usage has been described in one of Sheila Tobias' books on new teaching programs. The upshot of our previous work and our new teaching research is that we are immersed in the development of new teaching texts for introductory physics, including a "chaos-theory" primer and for our latest teaching approach, "cycling" (where we teach a whole course in, say, 1/3rd the time/detail and then revisit it twice more). And we cannot help but add that we finally prepared an article on "how far home runs really go," after many years of having fun with baseball calculations. As you can guess by now, our students, past and present, are collaborating in these latest works! I've got to stop, but I'm might tease the reader a bit by saying all the above is just the tip of the iceberg - stay tuned for the next installment (end of 2007?) to see what I mean.