Though modern physicists and astronomers come from backgrounds as diverse as the many sub-fields they study, it is often difficult to think of physicists from textbooks or undergraduate courses that deviate from the usual (simplified here for brevity!) Greeks to Galileo to Einstein history that we’re used to seeing. This pedagogical approach often struggles to encourage young physicists from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to pursue physics when none of the “role models” that are presented to them in undergraduate courses share much in common with them in both identity and modernity.
The project Bringing Contemporary Physicists to the Classroom, created by the McGill University Department of Physics, aims to create a set of teaching resources that diversify and modernize the examples of physics research that are used to accompany classroom lessons in astrophysics, optics, electromagnetism, and more. Originally compiled in 2021 by then-undergraduate student Katherine Savard (now a PhD student at Oxford), the Contemporary Physicists project solicited recommendations from department members at all career levels to recommend modern (along with some historical) physicists doing important research who wouldn’t be found in a traditional physics textbook. The project consists of slide decks and speaker notes that can easily be incorporated into lecture slides, including short biographies, introductions to relevant concepts, and examples of how the physics learned in the lecture is applied in real research. The slides are made to be accessible to undergraduates, and many can even be used in high school classrooms – given that many physics curricula are similar across institutions, the material is easily transferable beyond just McGill physics courses.
These physicists include recent Nobel Laureates Andrea M. Ghez and Donna Strickland , historical icons like experimental particle physicist Chien-Shiung Wu and theoretical nuclear physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer, and up-and-coming physicists at the top of their fields, like exoplanet researcher Aomawa Shields and biophysicist Ibrahim Cissé.
Over the past year, I worked with fourth-year undergraduate students Mikey Baker, Amélie Chiasson-David, and Parker Sherry to expand the project to include thirteen new physicists to supplement courses in astrophysics, quantum physics, optics, and condensed matter. When asked why she was interested in working on this project, Amélie responded, “representation in an undergraduate setting is extremely important. It allows students from any background to see themselves in the physicists of the contemporary age, which can help students feel more welcomed in the field”.
The project is not only a great way to give back to the physics community, but also helps contributors learn about different physicists and fields of physics than they usually encounter in their own research. “Even though this project is nominally about contemporary physicists, it’s also about how diverse a field physics is. Most of the people featured on this list aren’t carrying out experiments in a dusty lab or sitting in an armchair thinking about math – they’re expanding the scope of their discipline in new and surprising ways. Over the course of this project, I learned more about novel programming methods, observational astronomy, and obscure objects in our Solar System than I ever thought I would have!”, says Parker about what they learned while putting together slides for this project.
The slides created by these students, as well as additional resources about global historical records of supernovae and constellations, will be available later this summer. The course materials and resources for this project are all freely available for anyone to use, whether you’re a course instructor looking to improve your lecture slides, a teaching assistant who wants to give students real-life examples, or someone just looking to learn more about physics!
These slides have been used in several undergraduate physics and astronomy classes at McGill to give real-life examples of how the concepts learned in the class can be applied to broader research questions. In introductory astronomy classes, rather than talking about 16th-century Johannes Kepler to describe orbital motion, professors have successfully integrated slides into their existing presentations on modern astronomer Andrea Ghez’s application of Kepler’s third law to confirm the existence of our Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sgr A*. The slides contain the equations required for undergraduate students to do these calculations themselves on assignments or in an in-class example. We’ve also had success from teaching assistants drawing inspiration from these physicists’ work to write more realistic problems for student assignments and tutorials, e.g., using computational techniques to detect the first gravitational wave signal with LIGO, like Nergis Mavalvala or calculating the photoelectric effect used by Nadya Mason to study materials used in quantum computers.
If you’ve used these resources in any aspect of your physics teaching or learning, we’d love to hear from you! Submit feedback here and any recommendations for physicists you’d like to see featured on the website here.
Astrobite edited by: Sahil Hegde
Featured image credit: Perimeter Institute “Forces of Nature” Collection
