131 & 132 Professor David SchmitzIs your current research similar to the work you did as an undergrad or graduate student? I’ve been doing neutrino research, in one form or another, throughout my career, though the types of experiments and physics goals have varied widely. I started out (as an undergraduate) working on an experiment attempting to detect ultra high-energy cosmic neutrinos at the South Pole, then moved to a search for sterile neutrinos through neutrino oscillations in a beam at Fermilab (in graduate school), then to precision studies of how neutrinos interact with matter (as a postdoc), and now I’m back to using neutrino oscillations to test for sterile neutrinos (SBN at Fermilab) and to search for a new source of matter-antimatter asymmetry in particle physics (in the DUNE experiment). So neutrinos has been the common element throughout, but there is no shortage of fascinating questions to try to answer about neutrinos! What is your favorite non-physics way to spend time? I enjoy hiking, biking, running, sailing, camping, and most other activities that involve being outdoors. I also enjoy sports. This is the first year I haven’t played on a softball team during the summer since 2005 (hopefully we can return next year). Being at home so much this summer, I have enjoyed long runs on the Chicago lakefront followed by a refreshing dip in Lake Michigan! If you could switch lives with anyone in the department for a day, who would it be and why? Department Chair Young-Kee Kim, but only if you promise it’s just for a day! I have no idea how she accomplishes as many things as she does, so I’d be curious to find out, but I probably couldn’t handle it for longer than a day. What active measures do you take to ensure that your classroom is an inclusive space for all of your students? First, I always want my students to feel that they are welcome (encouraged even) to reach out to me outside of class. Mostly this is to discuss physics, and office hours are one of my favorite parts of any course, but it absolutely includes discussing any concerns that a student may have relating to the course or any impediments they are experiencing to their ability to learn effectively. This year it will be more important than ever to have opportunities for communication between students and instructors and between students and other students. We’ll try hard to create those opportunities and look forward to your feedback and suggestions as we go. Do you have children/pets/plants that make guest appearances on your zoom calls? Yep, my daughter, Natalie (6) and son, Calvin (4) both love to poke their heads in for two seconds, but then usually they just run away. We also have a cat named Kitty (in our defense, she came with the name), but she doesn’t come around so much to be seen on the video as to just walk on my keyboard and mess things up. Have you picked up or spent more time on any hobbies during the stay-at-home period? I got back to playing a little guitar this summer for the first time in quite a few years (since coming to UChicago, it has mostly just come out of the case for demonstrating standing waves in Physics 133/143!). It turns out that my daughter, who is very into music, is at a perfect age to start singing songs with me when I play, which is just fantastic! You can learn more about Professor Schmitz’s research on the Department of Physics webpage and the Neutrinos at UChicago webpage. Meet the 130s & 140s Professors is a series of mini interviews with professors teaching the general and honors introductory physics sequences, 13100-13300 and 14100-14300 respectively.
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131 Professor Heinrich JaegerWhat was your first experience with research like? It actually was in theoretical physics, for my MS degree. I thought I liked working on theory and certainly at the beginning that was the case, but in the end I realized it wasn’t for me. So, after my MS degree and one more year of trying to get somewhere with theory I switched to experiment. And never went back :) Is your current research similar to the work you did as an undergrad or graduate student? Not at all. My MS was with a thesis on a theory problem, my PhD was on experiments with superconductivity in extremely thin metal films, just a few atoms thick, at cryogenic temperatures and inside an ultrahigh-vacuum chamber. Now my group works on nanoparticle assembly, far from equilibrium dynamics of (dry and wet) granular matter, and jamming-based soft robotics. And we also collaborate with artists and architects on “aleatory architectures”. What do you think the coolest part of your research is? Moving into new directions for science where nobody has the answers yet and good problems can be discovered Do you have children/pets/plants that make guest appearances on your zoom calls? My dog Blue shows up on occasion…. What part of your teaching philosophy/method are you most proud of? Mentoring my students to come up with worthwhile science problems (as opposed to merely teaching how to find answers) What is your favorite part of the introductory physics sequence and why? Physics 111 or 112, because in that class I can introduce ideas from physics in a way that is much more exciting than in the standard textbooks, which simply regurgitate material that is 100+ years old (even so-called 'modern physics' is that old). So, we can talk about thinks like energy landscapes (and what one for a protein or a glassy system would look like), phase transitions between states of matter including entropically driven transitions, chaos, singularities…. You can learn more about Professor Jaeger’s research on the Department of Physics webpage and the Jaeger Lab webpage. Meet the 130s & 140s Professors is a series of mini interviews with professors teaching the standard and honors introductory physics sequences, 13100-13300 and 14100-14300 respectively. 131 Professor David ReidWhat do you think the coolest part of your research is? What I always find to be the coolest thing about research is when I know I am seeing something that no one has seen before be it a numerical result of a calculation, a graph I've produced, or whatever. Is your current research similar to the work you did as an undergrad or graduate student? Yes and no. One of the areas I work in is still precisely what I did in graduate school. However, after graduate school I branched out a bit into some other fields. However, I always seem to find myself writing code no matter what type of physics I'm doing. Fortran forever! What was your least favorite physics class you took as an undergraduate? Introductory electricity and magnetism. I was very unhappy with my professor's teaching and he was a jerk in office hours. He was the kind of guy who, instead of answering your question, would say "If you don't understand that you should get out of physics." What part of your teaching philosophy/method are you most proud of? I try not to be a jerk like my E&M professor. Do you have children/pets/plants that make guest appearances on your zoom calls? Yes, I have a chow mix who likes to hang out in my office while I'm working. This makes my wife jealous. She (the chow mix) will occasionally pop up and make a cameo - although I try to prevent that to avoid the distraction. Have you picked up or spent more time on any hobbies during the stay-at-home period? I get much more exercise now than when I had to commute back and forth. That's a good thing. What is your favorite part of the introductory physics sequence and why? This is a tough one. 1A is the connection between electricity and magnetism. This topic is less intuitive for students than mechanics so the teaching of it is more important. It's also easier to make connections to modern things with electromagnetism. 1B is teaching about energy in mechanics. Energy is such an important topic. It permeates all of physics and I find it rather mysterious and fun to think about. You can learn more about Professor Reid’s research on the Department of Physics webpage and the David D. Reid webpage. Meet the 130s & 140s Professors is a series of mini interviews with professors teaching the standard and honors introductory physics sequences, 13100-13300 and 14100-14300 respectively. 141 Professor Sidney NagelWhat do you think the coolest part of your research is? Seeing something beautiful or understanding a phenomenon that was puzzling in a beautiful way. Is your current research similar to the work you did as an undergrad or graduate student? My research work as an undergraduate dealt with building a detector for a particle physics experiment. In graduate school, I worked on the optical properties of metals in the infrared. These have very little to do with the work I do now which has to do with the behavior of fluids and with the properties of disordered matter. What is your favorite non-physics way to spend time? I like to garden, do woodwork, do photography, listen to music and read. What is your favorite place on campus? There is a room in the Oriental Institute which has the enormous head of a bull from Persepolis. It is an amazing room and I feel so much more calm after having been in there. What is your favorite part of the introductory physics sequence and why? I find that the second quarter of the sequence, where the laws of electricity and magnetism are discussed, is absolutely fantastic. After only ten weeks, we are able to show where light comes from! It is a surprise of the first order. Understanding the nature of light came from studying something that at the beginning seemed to be completely irrelevant to that phenomenon. Do you have children/pets/plants that make guest appearances on your zoom calls? My sixteen year old cat insists on climbing into my lap at times during Zoom calls. She is very shy at other times. You can learn more about Professor Nagel's research on the Department of Physics webpage and the Nagel Group webpage. Meet the 130s & 140s Professors is a series of mini interviews with professors teaching the standard and honors introductory physics sequences, 13100-13300 and 14100-14300 respectively. 141 Professor Abigail ViereggWhat do you think the coolest part of your research is? I build cosmic microwave background telescopes and neutrino detectors at the South Pole, in Greenland, and that fly on high-altitude balloons. The thing that got me hooked was that I get to go to these crazy places to build my experiments! Camping out on the Antarctic or Greenland Plateau (both of which I have done!) trying to get some equipment to work with only your hands and the resources you have out there is an amazing mental challenge. But ultimately, the thing that keeps anyone, including myself, going in science is that there are times when you literally know more than anyone in the world about the one tiny piece of the puzzle of how the universe works that you are researching. That’s a pretty amazing feeling, and its worth all the hours turning screws and debugging code. What active measures do you take to ensure that your classroom is an inclusive space for all of your students? There are a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways I try to do this. First, I directly put language on the syllabus addressing class standards for the way we treat each other, and ask students to hold me accountable to those standards as well. I try to set the tone on the first day of class that students should ask for help with course work, and give resources and ways they can get help. I try to be careful in what physics and math I assume students know before walking in the door, and what I am implicitly assuming about students’ lives outside of school by the policies and expectations I set for the course. I also have started to employ think-pare-share strategies in my classrooms, which are fun ways to meet other students and talk with classmates in more casual way than having to raise your hand. One of the hardest things, which I think is extremely important, is to continue training myself to not just pay attention to the students in the front row, or the most vocal students. This is especially difficult in a crowded office hours session! I remember as a student sitting in the middle of the lecture hall, never once asking a question in a physics lecture hall in probably the entire four years of college, how important it was to me when professors would be able to read my facial expression and know that I needed more explanation, without even asking. If you could switch lives with anyone in the department for a day, who would it be and why? Jon Simon! He has an awesome cat, kite boards, and does jiu jitsu! That sounds like a super fun day. What is your favorite place on campus? My lab of course. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not! Any day I get to do a project in the lab is a good day. Do you have children/pets/plants that make guest appearances on your zoom calls? Yes! This summer, my four year old daughter Lydia ran in to the room I was working in at home while I was holding Zoom group meeting and exclaimed “Mama! James (her baby brother) had a super big poop!” My research group was… bemused? What is your favorite part of the introductory physics sequence and why? As I have gone back and taught mechanics a few times now, both in 131 and 141, my favorite lecture to give is about work, energy, and potentials, especially in 141. It really is beautiful. There are also a few things I really love that you see later on in physics. I use E&M in my every day research life, and have a fondness for Fresnel coefficients, and I think the derivation of polarization-dependent reflected and refracted power is pretty amazing. I also use statistics a lot and really love giving the graduate students their first lecture on a likelihood-ratio based approach to frequentist confidence interval construction (Feldman-Cousins), after setting them up for an entire lecture on the troubles with classical confidence intervals. Its a slick solution to a problem with no one right answer. You can learn more about Professor Vieregg's research on the Department of Physics webpage and the Vieregg Lab webpage. Meet the 130s & 140s Professors is a series of mini interviews with professors teaching the general and honors introductory physics sequences, 13100-13300 and 14100-14300 respectively. Check back soon to read more! DEAR ABBY: I heard that there are two physics intro sequences at UChicago, the 130's and the 140's, but that the honors variant is super hard. I took calculus in high school but didn't do so well on my AP Physics exams... I'm interested in taking the honors sequence but I don't think my math/physics abilities are up to par. What should I do?
--INTRO SEQUENCE DILEMMA DEAR INTRO SEQUENCE DILEMMA: Where's the dilemma? You'll never know how you'll fare in the 140's unless you give it a try, right? You can always drop down if you don't feel comfortable, but you should make the decision that best suits you only after exhausting all possibilities - it doesn't make sense to block yourself off from the 140's without ever having experienced it yourself. |
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