Teaching

I am always on the lookout for new courses to contribute to the physics curriculum, as well as ways to improve our current offerings. (The motivated and engaged student population at Sarah Lawrence is fortunately a great audience for testing out new teaching techniques!)

Throughout my time at Sarah Lawrence, I have worked on creating an inquiry-based classroom and laboratory environment using the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), incorporating computation into the curriculum, and exploring ways to make my courses more equitable and inclusive.

Previous courses:

  • Classical Mechanics (Calculus-Based General Physics with Lab)

  • Electromagnetism & Light (Calculus-Based General Physics with Lab)

  • It’s About Time (First-Year Seminar)

  • Resonance and Its Applications (Intermediate Lab Course)

  • Time to Tinker (Workshop-style course)

  • Chaos (Open Seminar)

  • 20th-Century Physics (Open Seminar)

Click here for course descriptions.

Research

3D Printed Lab Equipment

3D Print designs for equipment used to take measurements, including: a linear actuator to discretely move NMR sample tube in side the magnet bore and holders for measuring the mapping the magnetic field inside the Mandhalas using an xy stage.

3D Printing Further Improved NMR Mandhalas

Information towards creating a strong, homogeneous magnetic field and linear gradient for imaging using a 3D printer and permanent magnets.

3D Printing Permanent Magnet Gradient

Implementing 3D printed gradients for use in low-cost magnetic resonance imaging.

3D Printing NMR Mandhalas

Information on creating NMR Mandhalas for a strong, homogeneous magnetic field using a 3D printer and permanent magnets.

Recent Posts

More Posts

research
​Link to PDF of poster shown above This summer, the Sarah Lawrence Summer Science Program was back! Three brave students came into the lab to continue the work of designing and building an affordable and accessible MRI system. They created the poster above to highlight their various projects, and links to their more detailed reports of their work can be found below. Improving Upon Our Optimization Algorithm Xandra Long (future computer science engineer) was our main computer programmer.

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research
(Written by Xandra Long) Intro This summer as a part of Merideth Frey’s research team, I approached computer science projects, both furthering some of Aaron Connover’s work as well as creating my own. At the beginning of the program I collected data from our TeachSpin NMR and by the end wrote an optimization genetic algorithm (GA) for our MANDHALA’s inner magnets. TeachSpin NMR Data I started off this summer gathering NMR data, using the TeachSpin, from samples of various materials we had in the research lab.

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research
(Written by Lee Brown) Making an account and getting started First, you’ll want to create a free account on TinkerCad. You’ll want to make a personal account instead of joining a class with a student account. Then you should try going through the “Direct Starter” tutorials to get familiar with the program. TinkerCad is pretty simple and easy to use, so it can be tempting to skip all the tutorials and just hop in and learn by doing.

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Selected Publications

Here we demonstrate how to use the quadratic echo pulse sequence to carry out three-dimensional MRI of the phosphorus (31P) in ex vivo bone and soft tissue samples.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Details PDF

Here we discuss an approach for reconstructing multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra and MR images from sparsely-sampled time domain data, by way of iterated maps. This method exploits the computational speed of the FFT algorithm and is done in a deterministic way, by reformulating any a priori knowledge or constraints into projections, and then iterating.
Journal of Magnetic Resonance
Details PDF

Recent & Upcoming Talks

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