Heather Lewandowski
The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) announced last week that JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski will receive the association’s Homer L. Dodge Citation for Distinguished Service to AAPT. Lewandowski’s dual research areas are in fundamental experimental molecular physics and Physics Education Research (PER). Within PER, Lewandowski studies how the structures of upper-level labs for undergraduates can best transition students into research lab environments.
Physics education researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Maine recently showed that students troubleshooting a malfunctioning electric circuit successfully tackled the problem by using models of how the circuit ought to work. The researchers confirmed this approach by analyzing videotapes of eight pairs of students talking aloud about their efforts to diagnose and repair a malfunctioning electric circuit. The circuits had not just one, but two problems. Both problems had to be corrected for the circuit to work properly.
It took Eric Cornell three years to build JILA’s first Top Trap with his own two hands in the lab. The innovative trap relied primarily on magnetic fields and gravity to trap ultracold atoms. In 1995, Cornell and his colleagues used the Top Trap to make the world’s first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), an achievement that earned Cornell and Carl Wieman the Nobel Prize in 2001.