Teaching Physics to the Life Science Student
Join Dr.’s Catherine Crouch and Brian Jones to explore adapting physics courses to better meet the needs of life science students, leading to enhanced physics understanding and appreciation.
Dr. Catherine Crouch, Swarthmore College
Dr. Brian Jones, Colorado State University
In this session, Catherine Crouch and Brian Jones share experiences in adapting courses to better meet the needs of life science students, leading to enhanced physics understanding, interest, and appreciation of the value of physics. They'll also show that this can be done while keeping a physics class very much a physics class, and without requiring the instructor to have extensive background in the life sciences.
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About the speakers
Dr. Catherine Crouch, Swarthmore College
Catherine Hirshfeld Crouch is professor of physics at Swarthmore College, where she has taught since 2003. Dr. Crouch has extensive expertise in both materials physics and pedagogical best practices for college and university science. She earned her PhD at Harvard University in experimental condensed matter physics, and then remained at Harvard in a dual postdoctoral fellowship in applied physics and physics education with Eric Mazur. She has published more than 20 peer-reviewed experimental physics research articles and more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles examining the effectiveness of methods and curricula for teaching introductory physics. Her work developing and evaluating a reformed curriculum optimizing introductory physics for life science and pre-medical students was initially supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science Education institutional grant and is currently supported by two National Science Foundation grants, one to Swarthmore and one collaborative grant led by the American Association of Physics Teachers.
Dr. Brian Jones, Colorado State University
Brian Jones has won several teaching awards at Colorado State University during his 32 years teaching in the Department of Physics. His teaching focus in recent years has been the college physics class. Since beginning work as a co-author on Knight, Jones, Field College Physics, he has taught physics to over 10,000 life science students, and he brings this experience to each edition of the book. In 2011, Brian was awarded the Robert A. Millikan Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers for his work as Director of the Little Shop of Physics, a hands-on science outreach program. He is actively exploring the effectiveness of methods of informal science education and how to extend these lessons to the college classroom. Brian travels extensively to work with educators at all levels, and has been invited to give workshops on techniques of science instruction in countries on five different continents.