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Introduction to Biological Physics — an old and new course
I’ve taught several times a graduate course on biophysics, the first instance of which I blogged about here. I love teaching this class, and students seem fond of it as well. I’m teaching it again...
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A Few Flavors of Microscopes — SAIL recap, 2023
What makes one microscope better than another? A few weeks ago I co-ran a week-long Physics and Human Physiology day camp for high school students, part of the University of Oregon’s “SAIL” program...
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Statistical Mechanics Has a Good Beat and You Can Dance To It
Last Spring, I taught the second term of University of Oregon’s statistical mechanics / thermodynamics for physics majors course (syllabus). I might at some point describe how the course went and what...
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Zoom Interview Questions and Other STEM Faculty Hiring Tidbits
There’s a lot of advice out there for prospective applicants for academic faculty positions [1], so you don’t really need mine. However, some advice is outdated and some is incomplete, so I thought it...
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Recap of a Graduate (and Undergraduate!) Biological Physics Course
Several times so far I’ve taught a graduate course on biophysics. Last term I taught it again, but with a twist: it was a combined graduate and undergraduate course. There were two motivations for...
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Course recap: “The Physics of Life” Winter 2024
This past term I taught my “Biophysics for non-science majors” course, actually called “The Physics of Life,” for the first time since 2018, and, more notably, for the first time since writing my...
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AI and exams in May 2024
You will find this post either shocking or obvious. If it’s obvious, you may nonetheless be shocked that others don’t find it obvious, or by how quickly the situation it describes has gone from...
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A strike, averted
On January 5, 2024, the graduate student union at the University of Oregon (UO) announced that they would go on strike, giving notice that it would begin on January 17. On January 15, the union and...
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The Active Seating Zone (An Educational Experiment)
How can we make a large class more lively? I tackled this question last term by allowing students to self-partition into different sets, with dramatic, and remarkably encouraging, results. Last term,...
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Is Our University President Poorly Paid?
Salary negotiations are currently underway at the University of Oregon (UO) between the faculty union and the administration. If this sounds familiar: graduate student salary negotiations concluded...
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