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 However, some advice is outdated and some is incomplete, so I thought it would be worthwhile to add a small bit of information based on experiences from my department’s search last year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
This past term, Fall 2022, I taught for the second time a course I created on image analysis. (Syllabus.) The structure and content were similar to last year’s — last year went well, and I put lots of work into it, so “if it ain’t broke…” Here’s a summary of things in the 2021 course … Continue reading Image Analysis Course Recap, Fall 2022
A more technical post than most. If the symbol and the equation look familiar to you, you’ll be fine. If not, you may still like the post, but in case you’re about to depart I’ll put my customary link to my pop-science biophysics book’s description here, and also share this week’s news that it will … Continue reading What does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle have to do with microscopy?
This past term (Fall 2021) I taught a course on image analysis. It was a new course — not just new for me but completely new, though it grew out of an informal image analysis class I’ve taught “off the books” before and have posted about. The class went well, though I severely underestimated how … Continue reading Image Analysis: Reflections on a New Course
A terrible question to ask in science is unfortunately quite common: Does something affect something else? It seems innocuous enough — after all, one might want to know whether exposure to sunlight affects one’s risk of skin cancer, or whether the location of the moons of Jupiter affects the stock market. The answer, however, is … Continue reading Pushed around by stars
What do I add to a first-year university physics class on simple harmonic motion? Anything? What’s the point of a class on simple harmonic motion? Why do first-year physics classes exist? I was thinking about these questions exactly six months ago, pre-pandemic, when I started writing a blog post that seems especially relevant now. I … Continue reading What’s the point of a first-year physics class?
Last week we had another successful run of our Physics & Human Physiology “SAIL” outreach day camp for high school students. I just realized that this is the 10th year I’ve co-run a SAIL camp, which means I should probably offer some grand assessment of it. Instead, I’ll just jot a few notes, post a … Continue reading SAIL Recap 2017
The Eighteenth Elephant 