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News Undergraduate Excellence

SMU Senior Jared Burleson wins Prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship

I am very proud to report that SMU President’s Scholar and Physics Major, Jared Burleson, has been selected to receive a Schwarzman Scholar award. The details are available in the SMU News release, which was reprinted by the Department of Physics. Since 2018, Jared has worked with me in the LHC, and now the EIC, […]

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Communication News Outreach

Science in the City: What a Trampoline Can Teach Us About the Unseen Universe

Prof. Jodi Cooley and I were very humbled and honored to be included in this year’s “Science in the City” program, hosted by the Dallas Morning News. The series is a partnership among The Dallas Morning News, SMU, UT Southwestern Medical Center, the Dallas-based education nonprofit talkSTEM, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science and […]

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News Research

The Lost Talk: Charm Jets as a Probe for Strangeness at the Future Electron-Ion Collider

I had a talk abstract accepted to the fall meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Nuclear Physics. However, the confirmation email that arrived on August 31 went unseen by me, and despite not confirming my talk I was put on the schedule for a mini-symposium on October 31. I only found out I […]

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News Teaching

Implementing an Honors Physics Add-On Course: The SMU Experience

Prof. Jodi Cooley, Dr. Eric Godat, and I were very pleased to see the publication of our article on how we implemented an add-on honors course experience at the introductory physics level here at SMU. In this article, we outline how we implemented an honors-level add-on course to complement standard university-level introductory physics courses. We […]

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News Outreach Research Teaching

A Tour of the SMU Physics Department

I was asked in the spring to put together a video for new, first-year undergraduate students, touring them through the SMU Physics Department. Please enjoy this virtual tour, from my perspective as a faculty member in the department. I am excited to welcome students, new and returning, to SMU this fall … regardless of how […]

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News Teaching

My Personal Digital Teaching Rig

Good digital teaching needs a number of skills: Coordination: you need to be able to move between technologies to make your point and keep the flow of the session going smoothly. Good tools enable easier coordination. Polish: more than you might in the classroom, where students feel they “get more for their buck” because you […]

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News Research

Charm jets as a probe for strangeness at the future Electron-Ion Collider

Miguel Arratia, Yulia Furletova, T. J. Hobbs, Fredrick Olness, Stephen J. Sekula We explore the feasibility of the measurement of charm-jet cross sections in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering at the future Electron-Ion Collider. This channel provides clean sensitivity to the strangeness content of the nucleon in the high-x region. We estimate charm-jet tagging performance with parametrized detector simulations. We show the […]

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News Research

Probing the Proton using Heavy Flavor at the Electron-Ion Collider

SMU has partnered with colleagues at Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California at Riverside to investigate the physics potential of reconstructing and identifying heavy flavor (charm and bottom) quark-initiated jets at the planned Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. My personal interest is in the use of heavy flavor production at […]

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News Teaching Undergraduate Excellence

Spring 2020 Honors Physics Grand Challenge Final Projects

I am so pleased with how the students in my Honors Introductory Physics (PHYS 1010) course met the new challenges posed by COVID-19 and the need for social distancing, producing excellent final projects for the class. Please enjoy them!

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News Teaching

Teaching in the Age of COVID-19

My Honors Physics class is a very hands-on class. Managing that in the age of COVID-19 has been an interesting challenge. Tonight, I invited my students (if it was safe to do so) to buy some inexpensive kitchen items – food dye, corn starch, and chocolate – and participate in “Physics in the Kitchen” tonight. […]