Exploring the World, Working for Change

I grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, during a time of significant social upheaval as our society dealt with civil rights issues related to race and gender and then the U.S. war in Vietnam. It was a time of youthful protest and exploring ways of promoting racial harmony, peace with justice, and a nascent environmental consciousness.

While I was too young to participate directly in the civil rights protests of the 1960s, I did witness brutal confrontations and discussions following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that helped shape the social consciousness that stayed with me into adult life. I was much more an active participant in the anti-Vietnam war work of the early 1970s, even being tear-gassed at a demonstration on the campus of Florida State University.

Cotemporaneous with this budding social activism, I developed an enthusiastic interest in mathematics and physics, heavily influenced by my sister Sara, who built her own telescope at the time and then went on to study engineering physics as an undergraduate and then completed a Ph.D in physics. This led to my formal education in physics at Duke University and then at Florida State University.

Returning to Tallahassee for graduate school was fortuitous for me, as I met and married Sally C. Fisher, with whom I have enjoyed 45 years of marriage. We have two delightful children, Brendan and Maira.

My research interests while in graduate school and during post-doctoral work at Florida State University and at the University of Leiden involved developing models of magnetic materials using the tools of quantum statistical mechanics. This research was heavily computational in nature involving computational symbolic mathematics and Monte Carlo simulations.

After moving to Doane University (then called Doane College), my major interest became physics education research. I was involved in a major curriculum revision project called The Humanized Physics Project, which produced curriculum materials for the algebra-based introductory physics sequence based on using the human body as a motivational theme.

More recently, I have explored topics in biological physics, particularly related to biofilm growth and engineering ethics education. I also continue to teach introductory physics in the online modality.

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Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash.

Photo by Artturi Jalli on Unsplash.