Next Thursday (10/10), Dr. Bob Hilborn, the Associate Executive Officer for the American Association of Physics Teachers, has been invited to deliver a joint Physics and Astronomy and Biology Colloquium entitled "Bring Physics Back to Life".
In many colleges and universities, the introductory physics course for students majoring in the life sciences (including the health sciences) constitutes the largest (or one of the largest) service courses that physics departments offer. Developing a physics course that explicitly serves the needs of those students is challenging because of the wide variety of professional interests of life science and health science students and because most physics faculty have little background in applying physics to those areas. The Living Physics Portal project was started in 2017 to establish a vetted and curated online set of resources for faculty teaching such courses. In this talk I will provide several examples from the Portal of “authentic” applications of physics to problems in the life and health sciences. Here, authentic means that the physics leads to a deeper understanding of the processes and properties of living systems. I will also provide a brief survey of the Living Physics Portal (http://www.livingphysicsportal.org) resources and how faculty can contribute to the collection of resources.
This work is supported by NSF grants 1624185, 1624478, 1624017, 1624374, 1624158, 1624007, 1624006, 1624549, 1624192.
Date: Thurs, Oct 10, at 4 pm (Coffee at 3:30)
Place: 136 Jorgensen Hall