About our new APS Fellows

David M. Cook grew up in Troy, NY, and received B.S. (1959) and Ph.D. (1965) degrees in physics from Rensselaer and Harvard. He then joined the Department of Physics at Lawrence University, where he received the Lawrence excellence in teaching award in 1990. During his 43 years on the Lawrence faculty, he taught nearly every course offered by his department and supervised a multitude of student projects. Between 1988 and 2008 (with support from the NSF, the W. M. Keck Foundation, and Lawrence University), Professor Cook directed an ongoing curricular development project that has created a departmental environment in which physics majors become expert at using state-of-the-art computing resources intelligently and independently. In February 2000, he received an NSF grant to support the assembling of the extensive locally developed instructional materials into a customizable textbook titled Computation and Problem Solving in Undergraduate Physics; the text was completed in January 2003, and continues to be used at several colleges around the country. Just before his retirement in June 2008, Professor Cook was elected Vice-President of the AAPT, serving four years in the presidential chain. In that capacity, he served on several AAPT Advisory Committees and as AAPT representative to the AIP Governing Board, the APS Council, the APS/FEd Nominating Committee, and the APS/FEd Executive Committee. In January 2013, he will embark on a three-year term as chair of the AAPT Meetings Committee.

Paul Cottle earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale in 1986 and joined the faculty of Florida State University in the same year. He has published more the 100 refereed papers in experimental nuclear physics, and in 1987 was awarded the Presidential Young Investigator Award by the National Science Foundation. Cottle has been involved in teacher education and other K-12 issues for twenty years. He was a member of the committee that wrote Florida's science standards in 2007-2008, and is presently serving on the chair line of the APS Forum on Education and as Chair of the society's Committee on Education. He was awarded the George B. Pegram Award by the Southeastern Section of the APS in 2002.

Paul DeYoung graduated from Hope College, completed his doctorate at the University of Notre Dame in 1982, and subsequently conducted research at the Nuclear Structure Laboratory, SUNY-Stony Brook, before returning to Hope to teach. He is currently the Kenneth G. Herrick Professor of Physics at Hope, where he co-leads the college’s “nuclear group”. His research has received continuous support since 1985, from agencies including the National Science Foundation, Research Corporation and the Michigan Space Grant Consortium, and has resulted in more than 80 journal articles and more than 80 presentations at professional conferences. In February 2011, the college’s division for the natural and applied sciences recognized him for with that year’s “James N. Boelkins Natural and Applied Sciences Division Research Award”. He loves teaching students about physics through involvement in original research.

David E. Meltzer received a Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from SUNY Stony Brook in 1985, then went on to complete six years of post-doctoral work at the University of Tennessee and the University of Florida. In 1991 he joined the faculty at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond and turned his focus to research on the learning and teaching of physics. Since 1992 his primary work has been in physics education research and physics curriculum development, and he has been Principal Investigator on nine projects funded by the National Science Foundation. He joined the faculty at Iowa State University in 1998 and from 1998 to 2005 he was director of the Iowa State University Physics Education Research Group. He later taught at the University of Washington in Seattle and joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 2008 as an Associate Professor. He has taught more than two dozen different university courses on physics, science, and science education, and has also regularly taught middle-school science classes since 2007. He has published 30 papers in refereed journals and proceedings, edited seven books, and given about 100 invited presentations in five countries. He is a consultant to the American Physical Society and the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC), and Senior Consultant to the National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics. He is also a competitor in Masters Olympic-style weightlifting.

Disclaimer–The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.