Research and Teaching Interests

Computational Physics: I am currently working on a draft of a textbook which I call Introductory Computational Physics with Python. I am using draft chapters in my fall 2009 course, Computational Physics.

Granular Physics: I have been studying the stick-slip dynamics of a two dimensional array of cylinders. We are looking at the statistics of stick-slip events as well as rotational motion within the array. See the Granular Physics Lab page for more information. I am currently working on a computer simulation of a two layer granular system.

Physics Education: My main inspiration for physics education came from reading the works of Carl R. Rogers (Freedom to Learn and it's revisions). I have been incorporating authentic assessment and conceptual questioning into my introductory physics classes. In addition, I am integrating modern computer-based data acquisition into the advanced physics labs and have developed a way to measure Boltzmann's constant by using video microscopy of Brownian motion

Curriculum Vitae: Click CurriculumVitae2007.pdf to download in PDF format. The file includes as an attachment, the original LaTeX source which you can feel free to extract (you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader) and use as a LaTeX CV template. (updated 04/19/2007)