2021 AAPT award citations at the virtual summer meeting Free

This award is given in recognition of contributions to undergraduate physics teaching, and awardees are chosen for their extraordinary accomplishments in communicating the excitement of physics to their students. John Wiley & Sons is the principal source of funding for this award, through its donation to the AAPT.

Anne J. Cox will receive the 2021 David Halliday and Robert Resnick Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Physics Teaching. Regarding her selection for this award, Cox said, “I am humbled and honored to receive this award. An award from AAPT is particularly meaningful to me since AAPT has been the means by which I have learned so much about teaching and, more importantly, it has served as a professional home, a community that understands the joys and frustrations of the physics classroom.”

Dr. Cox is a Professor of Physics at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. She graduated magna cum laude with her B.S. in Physics at Rhodes College, where she was the only female physics major, and earned her Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Virginia.

She began teaching at Eckerd College in 1995 and has been a dedicated teacher and researcher at the Physics Department with her appointment as Professor in Physics in 2006. Her outstanding teaching, in physics and across disciplines, was recognized in 2004 when Anne received Eckerd's Robert A. Staub Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award. She has also been a research mentor to over 25 Eckerd students in experimental work: from atomic cluster studies to developing experiments for advanced labs. Cox's current research interests are curriculum development and pedagogical strategies to enhance student learning using technology. She is a contributing author of Physlet Physics: Interactive Illustrations, Explorations, and Problems for Introductory Physics and co-author of Physlet Quantum Physics, both now available on AAPT ComPADRE. In addition, she is the author or co-author of over a dozen papers on the pedagogical use of technology with papers appearing in The Physics Teacher and Physics Education.

A very active member in the Florida Section of the AAPT, her service has included the leadership positions of President and Section Representative, and twice she has hosted a Florida Section meeting. For this work, the FL-AAPT Section recognized Dr. Cox with their Distinguished Service Award.

She has also been an advocate for women in physics her whole career, starting as an undergraduate at Rhodes College where she was an advocate for herself, as the only physics major in her year, as she recounts in the AAPT video, HERStories (https://www.aapt.org/resources/herstories.cfm). She later participated in the NSF ADVANCE sponsored, “Collaborative Research for Horizontal Mentoring Alliances,” which was a peer mentoring alliance of five female full professors in physics at liberal arts institutions. This peer mentoring experience led to Anne being a Co-PI on the NSF ADVANCE grant, “Mutual Mentoring to Reduce Isolation in Physics,” an AAPT project to develop mentoring networks of isolated women physics faculty.

Dr. Cox has been a fixture at AAPT meetings for over 20 years. She has served several times as a member and as chair of Committee on Women in Physics and the Committee on Educational Technology. In those capacities, she has organized sessions and given numerous presentations and workshops. In 2008, she received a Distinguished Service Citation and is an AAPT Fellow.

In nominating her for this award, Dr. Cox's colleague at Eckerd College noted, “It is well known that her door is open to all female faculty members on our campus and other campuses. I have seen her mentoring become an effective tool in retaining and recruiting some of our best new faculty in science and math. This has been mirrored in the growing populace of female physics majors among our undergraduate students. She empowers our faculty and students to have confidence in their creative ideas. She is continually trying new things, keeping those that work and discarding those that do not. When she finds an idea that does resonate, she does her best, as good teachers do, to spread these ideas through publications, websites, grants, committees, and conferences.”

The title of her talk at the Summer Meeting was Mission Possible.

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson has been named as the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Hans Christian Oersted Medal, presented by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). The Medal will be awarded at a Ceremonial Session of the 2021 AAPT Summer Meeting. The Oersted Medal, established in 1936, recognizes her outstanding, widespread, and lasting impact on the teaching of physics through her pioneering national leadership in physics education, her exceptional service to AAPT, and her mentoring of students and in-service teachers.

Dr. Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is a theoretical physicist. She has had a distinguished career that includes senior leadership positions in academia, government, industry, and research. She holds an S.B. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics—both from MIT. She is the first African American woman to receive a doctorate from MIT—in any field—and has been a trailblazer throughout her career, including as the first African American woman to lead a top-ranked research university.

After receiving her degree, Dr. Jackson was hired as a research associate in theoretical physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. While at Fermilab, she studied medium to large subatomic particles, specifically hadrons, a subatomic particle with a strong nuclear force. In 1974, after two years with the Fermilab, she served as a visiting science associate at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland and worked on theories of strongly interacting elementary particles.

In 1976, Dr. Jackson began working on the technical staff for Bell Telephone laboratories in theoretical physics. Her research focused on the electronic properties of ceramic materials in hopes that they could act as superconductors of electric currents. That same year, she was appointed professor of physics at Rutgers University. In 1980, Jackson became the president of the National Society of Black Physicists, and in 1985, she began serving as a member of the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology.

In 1991, she served as a professor at Rutgers while working for AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1995, she was appointed by President Clinton to the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In 1997, Dr. Jackson led the formation of the International Nuclear Regulators Association. In 1998, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame; the following year, she became the eighteenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She remains an advocate for women and minorities in the sciences and, since 2001, has brought needed attention to the “Quiet Crisis” of America's predicted inability to innovate in the face of a looming scientific workforce shortage.

In 2015, Dr. Jackson received the inaugural Alice H. Parker Award from the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, which honors women leaders in innovation. In 2016, United States President Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for contributions in science and engineering.

In 2018, she was awarded the W.E.B. DuBois Medal from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The medal honors those who have made significant contributions to African and African–American history and culture, and more broadly, individuals who advocate for intercultural understanding and human rights in an increasingly global and interconnected world.

The title of her talk at the Summer Meeting was Physics: The River that Runs Through It All.

The recipient of the Doc Brown Futures Award is Dr. Ramón S. Barthelemy. The Doc Brown Futures Award recognizes early career members who demonstrate excellence in their contributions to AAPT and physics education and exhibit the potential to serve in an AAPT leadership role. The award was presented during the 2021 Summer Meeting.

“AAPT has been a critical part of my physics education research journey and I am very honored to have been nominated by my peers for this award. This community is full of amazing people who do forward thinking work to support People of Color, LGBT+, and other underrepresented physicists,” said Barthelemy. A member of AAPT since 2011, Ramón Barthelemy is an early career physicist with a record of groundbreaking scholarship and advocacy. He has advanced the field of Physics Education Research (PER) as it pertains to gender issues and LGBT+ physicists. Through service and advocacy, he has strengthened AAPT's efforts to broaden participation in physics.

Dr. Barthelemy earned his B.S. in Astrophysics at Michigan State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics Education Research at Western Michigan University. He received a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland in 2014 and an AAAS Science Policy Fellowship in 2015. He is also the recent recipient of two National Science Foundation grants to continue his work on gender in physics and also expand it to people of color in STEM and graduate program reform.

He began his position as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy (P&A) at the University of Utah in 2019. He is the first tenure track PER faculty hired in P&A at “The U” and has begun their first PER research group, the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Utah (PERU). Dr. Barthelemy also teaches courses in calculus-based introductory physics and physics education.

His involvement with AAPT has included serving on the Committee on Women in Physics and organizing sessions for that committee as well as the Committee on Diversity. He was one of the early advocates for LGBT+ voices in AAPT, leading discussions and organizing the first AAPT session on the topic. He is also one of the authors of the APS report “LGBT Climate in Physics: Building an Inclusive Community.” Though this work was not done under the auspices of AAPT, the report has been a valuable resource to many AAPT members—both those whose stories were being told for the first time and others who want to improve their departments and workplaces for LGBT colleagues and students. He was a coauthor on the first edition of the “LGBT+ Inclusivity in Physics and Astronomy Best Practices Guide,” which offers actionable strategies for physicists to improve their departments and workplaces. He also recently published a peer reviewed paper on this topic in the European Journal of Physics with more in review.

Barthelemy is a valued collaborator and can be relied on to challenge biases and inequities. He has been a leader in pushing forward Physics Education Researchers' understanding of gender and LGBT issues in physics.

The title of his talk at the Summer Meeting was Queering PER: A History of Queer Rights in the USA and Physics.

Chandralekha Singh

Past-President, AAPT