How does public funding for science work in the United States? How much money is there? Who gets it, and how? How much does a graduate student cost? Even normally, science funding is a rich topic worth exploring, and now, as the president is attempting to radically change the structure of science in the U.S. … Continue reading An Informal Overview of US Science Funding
How many out-of-state (non-Oregon-resident) students are there at the University of Oregon (UO)? This is an easy question to answer: about 9000, or about 45% of the total undergraduate student population. (Source; select “Class level”.) This is high but not unusual for similar public universities; as I plotted a few years ago, we have company … Continue reading Are we missing 400 students?
Last quarter, I taught for the first time the first term of the introductory undergraduate physics sequence, the standard “physics with calculus”:” class that exists in some form at nearly every university. Usually I teach courses for non-science majors (on renewable energy, for example) or graduate courses (on biophysics, for example), so this was a … Continue reading The most important, and the most pointless, course I’ve taught
Last term (Fall 2024) I again taught the computational image analysis course I developed a few years ago (see 2021, 2022). It was again a mixed graduate and undergraduate course, this time with an enrollment of 18: 14 graduate and 4 undergraduate. For a primarily graduate elective course, this is a large number of students; … Continue reading Image Analysis Course Recap, Fall 2024
I’m always interested to hear who won the latest Physics Nobel Prize, and today’s announcement was particularly exciting: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Is it surprising? Is it controversial? Apparently yes. I predicted Hopfield in response to a friend’s poll a few … Continue reading The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics — Yes, Physics!
How can we make a large class more lively? I tackled this question last term by allowing students to self-partition into different sets, with dramatic, and remarkably encouraging, results. Last term, Spring 2024, I taught a “physics of renewable energy for non-science majors course” [1]. I often teach “general education” classes aimed at non-science-majors, including … Continue reading The Active Seating Zone (An Educational Experiment)
This past term I taught my “Biophysics for non-science majors” course, actually called “The Physics of Life,” for the first time since 2018, and, more notably, for the first time since writing my pop-science book, So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World (blog post; Amazon) — published in 2022 (and … Continue reading Course recap: “The Physics of Life” Winter 2024
Several times so far I’ve taught a graduate course on biophysics. Last term I taught it again, but with a twist: it was a combined graduate and undergraduate course. There were two motivations for this. First, biophysics is unfamiliar enough to physics graduate students that upper-division undergraduates aren’t at any significant disadvantage. In fact, I’ve … Continue reading Recap of a Graduate (and Undergraduate!) Biological Physics Course
There’s a lot of advice out there for prospective applicants for academic faculty positions [1], so you don’t really need mine. However, some advice is outdated and some is incomplete, so I thought it would be worthwhile to add a small bit of information based on experiences from my department’s search last year (Physics, University … Continue reading Zoom Interview Questions and Other STEM Faculty Hiring Tidbits
I’ve taught several times a graduate course on biophysics, the first instance of which I blogged about here. I love teaching this class, and students seem fond of it as well. I’m teaching it again next Fall (2023) but with a twist: it will now be a combined undergraduate / graduate course. The motivations are … Continue reading Introduction to Biological Physics — an old and new course
The Eighteenth Elephant 