Department of Physics
IMPROVING PHYSICS AT LAWRENCE
David M. Cook and John R. Brandenberger
(Following is the text of an article that has been written for publication in the Spring, 1999, issue of the Lawrence alumni magazine Lawrence Today.)
[Editor's Note: The Department of Physics at Lawrence and its program were showcased at an October 1998 national conference titled "Physics Revitalization Conference: Building Undergraduate Physics Programs for the 21st Century" in Arlington, Virginia. The conference was organized by the American Association of Physics Teachers and cosponsored by the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and Project Kaleidoscope, a national alliance of individuals, institutions, and organizations committed to strengthening undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education. Ten departments were selected to serve as case studies for discussions of innovative developments in physics education. Lawrence and Colgate University were the only liberal arts colleges selected as case studies. Further information about the department can be found at its website http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/physics.
David M. Cook is professor of physics and the Philetus E. Sawyer Professor of Science. John R. Brandenberger is professor of physics. Each has served the college for over thirty years; Cook joined the faculty in 1965 and Brandenberger in 1968.]
For more than a decade, the Department of Physics at Lawrence has sought to become one of the premier small physics departments in the country. While opinions vary on what constitutes a good undergraduate physics department, we believe that the distinguishing characteristics of a strong department include good teaching, a reasonably comprehensive curriculum, faculty research that is recognized elsewhere, a critical mass of serious students actively learning physics and participating from time to time in undergraduate research, significant impact on the host institution and elsewhere with outreach efforts, a departmental environment that engages and challenges majors and non-majors alike, and up-to-date facilities and equipment. Although good teaching and a strong curriculum are obviously essential, we place considerable emphasis on the notion that a good department must offer a broad-gauge program that encompasses much more than a curriculum. We have therefore come to believe that a department that seeks to improve itself must give serious attention to its entire program, not simply to a new course here and there or to revised teaching methods. With substantial assistance over the past fifteen years from the W. M. Keck Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Research Corporation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the General Electric Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Lawrence University, and other sources, we have made progress in strengthening many aspects of our program.
Our efforts to improve the department began in the mid-1980s when the two of us, unhappy with the drawing power of our program, undertook to develop two distinct specialties within the department as vehicles for attracting students. With support and encouragement from the Lawrence administration and particularly from our now-retired departmental colleague J. Bruce Brackenridge (whose contribution of courses in history of planetary astronomy and theories of motion comprised another element in our overall effort to build a departmental program), we decided to emphasize laser physics and computational physics, both of which were emerging as important topics in physics but were still largely underrepresented in undergraduate physics nationally. To develop facilities, local expertise, and curricular components to bring these two specialties to a position of prominence in the department, we sought outside support, assuring our funding sources that developments at Lawrence would be innovative and that we would disseminate the results of our work widely in hopes of spreading the impact of our efforts to other institutions as well.
A half million dollars of outside grants and gifts, along with support from Lawrence, provided the necessary equipment, supplemental salaries, and miscellaneous wherewithal to launch these activities. A suite of laser labs, including the Laser Palace, and the Computational Physics Laboratory were created and equipped, and several curricular modifications were implemented very quickly. Two national conferences supported by the Sloan Foundation — one on laser physics and the other on computation in upper-level physics curricula — were held at Lawrence. Both conferences produced reports and proceedings that were distributed to all undergraduate physics departments nationwide. These early efforts began to identify Lawrence as an innovator in undergraduate physics, and they resulted in invitations for us to give talks at several national meetings. Further, they created at Lawrence specialized facilities that even today are unmatched in virtually all other small institutions, facilities that attracted — and still attract — occasional visitors whowish to see firs t-hand what has been happening at Lawrence.
In 1987, we capitalized on these new-found strengths by initiating an annual series of weekend workshops designed to recruit high school seniors with strong interests in physics. These workshops, which involve a full day of hands-on experience and about ten different activities in our laboratories, are intensive and instructive. Supported by the Office of Admissions and held in late February, they stimulate applications to Lawrence and each year bring 30 or 40 participants from around the country to consider Lawrence as a place to study physics and prepare for careers in the field. Our main goal in mounting these workshops is to induce applicants to accept Lawrence's offer of admission, and roughly 30% of the workshop attendees choose to attend Lawrence. As a secondary benefit, these labor-intensive workshops require us to involve current students as assistants and hosts, thereby increasing departmental pride and esprit and giving current students partial ownership in the process of perpetuating the success and strength of the department.
These workshops have increased both the number and quality of physics students coming to Lawrence. Four years after we started recruiting, the number of physics graduates jumped from five per year to more than ten per year during a time when national trends were in the opposite direction. The fraction of Lawrence physics majors graduating with honors and competing for major national scholarships increased sharply as well. More generally, the impact of this recruitment effort on the Department has been substantial. Since we began these efforts, over fifty percent of our graduates have chosen to attend graduate school in physics, engineering, or some allied field. During the past decade, our physics graduates have gained admission to and support from such major graduate institutions as Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Oxford. Physics majors have also pursued advanced study in medicine, law, environmental engineering, religion, robotics, biophysics, computer science, and secondary education. Four graduates of the past fifteen years have accepted assistant professorships at colleges and universities.
Complementing our efforts at building laser and computational physics as departmental specialties, another aspect of our early efforts to improve our program focused on modernizing our introductory laboratories. In the late 1980’s John E. Gastineau (’80), who was then a member of our faculty, introduced a number of experiments designed to help students build their intuitive understanding of physical principles. To that end, each station in the laboratory was equipped with a computer and appropriate auxiliary equipment to facilitate quick data acquisition and analysis. These improvements, and more recent enhancements, continue to play an important role not only in preparing prospective majors for their later studies but also in helping all introductory students, including those taking outreach courses with laboratories, to build their physical intuition.
Several years ago the department shifted its goal from developing specialties to developing the infrastructure required of a strong, albeit small, physics department. We wanted to provide students with good backgrounds in theoretical, experimental, and computational physics, and we endorsed the idea of a significant capstone activity in the senior year. We also embraced the idea that each faculty member should establish and maintain an ambitious ongoing program of research/scholarship that would complement our collective pedagogical efforts and create a special area or "signature program" that would generate additional identity for the department, strengthen our capacity to recruit students, and provide the facilities and expertise for the offering of special courses. Currently, the departmental faculty of Jeffrey Collett, Matthew Stoneking, and the two of us pursue research interests in experimental condensed matter physics (specifically phase transitions using x-ray techniques), experimental plasma physics focusing on non-neutral plasmas, experimental atomic and laser physics, and computational physics. New construction and renovation of spaces in Youngchild Hall in the next few years will provide each faculty member with a 500 square foot research laboratory and a special 750 square foot teaching laboratory designed to support instruction associated with that faculty member's signature program.
To build greater depth and infrastructure, the department is now focusing more energy and effort on an expansion of faculty and faculty-student research/scholarship. Faculty and undergraduate research in physics has existed at Lawrence for decades, but until recently its scope was too narrow for a strong small department. Hence with encouragement from Research Corporation, we developed a long-term plan designed to produce substantial improvement in our programs. Consistent with our conviction that a departmental program embraces more than its courses alone, this plan included not only curricular development for majors and non-majors but also such elements as library improvement, colloquium expansion, machine-shop improvement, and expansion of departmental spaces. The most prominent element, however, was expanded research activity. We envisioned four separate research programs on campus, and set our sights on increased faculty and student productivity in this area.
After a visit by President John P. Schaefer and Brian Andreen of Research Corporation, we submitted a proposal that won funding in 1995. The plan called for a grant of $300,000 from Research Corporation matched by $250,000 from Lawrence and $400,000 from other sources over a period of four years. The latter figure was to include individual research grants from sources such as Research Corporation, the Petroleum Research Fund, the Department of Energy, Exxon and others which, indeed, have supplied critical support for faculty research. The sum total of research and departmental grants over the past fifteen years is $1.8 million — money that has supported research, the purchase and building of teaching equipment, summer salaries for faculty members and undergraduate assistants, travel to meetings and seminars, library acquisitions, consultants, outside visitors, and other activities. This effort to improve has also entailed annual visits by consultants Robert C. Hilborn of Amherst College and Robert B. Hallock of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as well as by Vice-Presidents Brian Andreen and Michael P. Doyle of Research Corporation. Our venture is now in its fourth and final year, and the progress and improvements are noteworthy.
A key element in this four-year plan was the establishment of a capstone program in which seniors, with substantial faculty assistance, pursue ambitious undertakings that usually assume the form of undergraduate research projects. Other components of the plan include a substantial expansion of summer research opportunities for students. We are also expanding the department's outreach offerings so as to provide greater opportunities for non-majors to encounter physics in various guises. To extend our past offerings in the history of planetary astronomy and theories of motion, we now offer outreach courses in the nature of light, laser physics, the physics of music, cosmology, and astronomy. Some of these courses have laboratory components and all are available to students seeking to fulfill the science requirement. In the past two years, the astronomy and physics of music courses have attracted overflow enrollments.
Over the past decade, we have also sought to increase student involvement in departmental affairs. Students now contribute regularly to curricular discussions, interviewing of candidates for positions, entertaining visitors, and assisting with introductory laboratories and recruiting workshops. Regular social gatherings, frequent student/faculty teas, evening receptions for visiting scientists, and occasional larger-scale events (picnics and departmental retreats) help generate departmental rapport. We expect increasingly active chapters of the Society of Physics Students and our long-standing Sir Isaac Newton Society to play important roles in this area.
To motivate long-term improvement and in pursuit of our goal to become a premier small physics department, we set our sights fairly high, embracing goals that initially seemed a bit ambitious. We knew that achieving our goals would require a substantial stretch for the department. Having dedicated considerable time and effort to this program of improvement, we remain convinced that the development of a few special offerings provides an effective springboard for improvement and revitalization. Without question, this strategy has led to success in attracting larger numbers of strong students, in building and maintaining departmental pride and faculty commitment, in attracting and retaining new faculty, and in winning a steady stream of outside funding.
The nurturing of undergraduate research has also proven to be an important component of our strategy for improvement. In particular, we have found that prospective students respond very positively when current students describe or demonstrate their research or capstone projects. Further, graduates frequently point to their involvement in research or independent study as the most significant experience of their undergraduate careers, an experience that finally helped them perceive physics as a whole rather than as a collection of courses.
A department needs help from various sources when it embarks on a broad-gauge program of improvement. We have found our graduates to be an immensely valuable resource. Whether we need advice on specific research matters or on the suitability of proposed visitors, whether we need financial support for equipment or for undergraduate research stipends or gifts in kind, when we need a practitioner in a certain subspecialty to take some time to offer cogent and expert counsel to a current student, when we need advice and backing in search of corporate or foundation support, when we need "representatives" who are willing to act on our behalf at considerable distance to interact with prospective faculty members — these and various other activities and generous contributions made almost routinely by our graduates have become important ingredients in the annual operation, long-term health, and gradual improvement of the department. Of course administrative support has also been critical. President Warch and various Deans of the College, along with other members of the administration, have given us assistance, backing, advice and encouragement that has proven to be pivotal at numerous junctures. To all these members of the extended Lawrence community, we offer our thanks and appreciation.
Revitalizing a departmental program is a lot of work and must be carried out on several fronts. Certainly substantial attention must be paid to curricular development and to nurturing faculty scholarship and undergraduate research, but attention must also be paid to such elements of a program as regular colloquia, facilities (both space and equipment), library resources, recruitment of students, and encouragement of out-of-class social and intellectual interactions among students and among students and faculty members. Major enhancements in all elements of a departmental program cannot be implemented overnight; significant improvement requires a concentrated effort on the part of an entire department for perhaps five or ten years. The pleasure in the effort, the satisfaction in seeing the improvements emerge, and especially the pride we take in the accomplishments of the students who have worked along with us in this effort are more than enough reward.