Wolfgang Christian Brown Professor of Physics Emeritus

I am the Emeritus Brown Professor of Physics at Davidson College where I taught for 33 years. During my first decade at Davidson, I established an NSF funded laser spectroscopy research laboratory that allowed me to incorporate multiphoton ionization experiments into our Advanced Laboratory course. My expertise in computer networking and data acquisition later led me to change my research to computational physics and instructional software design and I have been recognized as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and as a Fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers for that work.

I am the author or co-author of nine books including: Open Source Physics: A User’s Guide with Examples (Addison Wesley 2006), An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods : Applications to Physical System (Addison Wesley 2006), Physlet Quantum Physics (Prentice Hall 2005), Physlet Physics (Prentice Hall 2004), Physlets: Teaching Physics with Interactive Curricular Material (Prentice Hall, 2001), Just-in-Time Teaching (Prentice Hall, 1999), and Waves and Optics: Volume 9 of the Computational Physics Upper Level Software, CUPS, series (Wiley, 1995).

I have been books editor of the AIP journal Computers in Physics and I am the past chair of the American Physical Society Forum on Education. I was also the co-chair of the 2008 Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education. From 2013-2019, I served as the Secretary of the American Association of Physics Teachers and on the Board of the American Institute of Physics Publishing LLC.

I continue to work on physics curriculum development using the World Wide Web and open source computational physics tools and I am the managing editor of the Open Source Physics (OSP) National Science Digital Library. The OSP library was recently recognized by the American Physical Society with the 2020 Excellence in Physics Education Award.