Related papers: Astrophysical Dynamics 1999/2000: Merging Research…

General-education college astronomy courses offer instructors both a unique audience and a unique challenge. For many students, such a course may be their first time encountering a standalone astronomy class, and it is also likely one of…

This paper describes the development of a new university physics course designed to integrate physics, education, research, and community partnerships. The coordinated system of activities links the new course to local community efforts in…

Experience suggests that structural issues in how institutional Astrophysics approaches data-driven science and the development of discovery technology may be hampering the community's ability to respond effectively to a rapidly changing…

We present two programs that address needs to better prepare graduate students for their roles as professional physicists, particularly in the areas of teaching and education research. The two programs, Preparing Future Physicists (PFP) and…

The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems.…

Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…

As 2005, the International Year of Physics, comes to an end, two physicists working primarily in geophysical research reflect on how geophysics is not an applied physics. Although geophysics has certainly benefited from progress in physics…

Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…

With each passing decade, we gain new appreciation for the dynamic, connected, and often violent nature of the Universe. This reality necessarily places the study of high-energy processes at the very heart of modern astrophysics. This White…

We redesigned an advanced physics laboratory course to include a project component. The intention was to address learning outcomes such as modeling, design of experiments, teamwork, and developing technical skills in using apparatus and…

In the last years it is becoming more and more evident the importance in providing to the students, and people in general, a more realistic view on the scientific research world. In this framework many initiatives are beeing carried out to…

The amount and complexity of data delivered by modern galaxy surveys has been steadily increasing over the past years. Extracting coherent scientific information from these large and multi-modal data sets remains an open issue and data…

As astronomy enters an era defined by global telescope networks, petabyte-scale surveys, and powerful computational tools, the longstanding goals of astronomy education, particularly introductory ``ASTRO101'', but equally encompassing both…

The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…

Improving the physics enterprise to broaden participation in physics is one of the main goals of the physics education research community. Many classically trained physics faculty transition during their faculty career into engaging in…

This report provides an overview of recent work that harnesses the Big Data Revolution and Large Scale Computing to address grand computational challenges in Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, with a particular emphasis on real-time discovery…

The multi-messenger exploration of dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model has emerged as a central direction in modern astro-particle physics, particularly following the discovery of gravitational waves. In this work, we present…

The purpose of this manuscript is to review my recent activity on three main research topics. The first concerns the nature of low temperature amorphous solids and their relation with the spin glass transition in a magnetic field. This is…

This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…

The theory of the dynamical systems is a very complex subject which has brought several surprises in the recent past in connection with the theory of chaos and fractals. The application of the tools of the dynamical systems in cosmological…