Brett Fadem Professor, Physics |
Education
Ph.D. - Physics / Iowa State Univeristy
B.A. - Physics / Grinnell College
Teaching Interests
I love to teach physics at all levels, from first year physics for scientists (as well as first year physics for non-scientists) to our Advanced Projects culminating educational experience course that stresses really fun advanced laboratory activities. It is also very fulfilling to participate in the first year seminar program where I have taught the course, "Now I am Become Death: Brains, the Bomb, and the Bellicose" which combines history, history of science, science, and ethics and focuses on developing writing skills. My goal is to engender interest in how nature works, encourage lively discussion, and take pleasure in the scientific investigation or the works around us. A pet project of mine has been the development of a muon telescope to be used in the undergraduate laboratory that allows the study of high energy particle physics.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
My students and I have participated in the scientific program at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The particle accelerator is used to study matter under extreme conditions such as those that existed microseconds after the big bang. The quark-gluon plasma, a new state of matter in which even protons and neutrons are melted into their constituent parts, was discovered at RHIC in 2005, and has been studied ever since. Muhlenberg College was an institutional member of the PHENIX collaboration and is an institutional member of the sPHENIX collaboration, a large group of scientists and engineers who are constructing a new detector at RHIC and we look forward to Muhlenberg College students participating in the construction of this detector!