Posts tagged Al Bartlett
CU professor Steven Pollock is the BEST!
Nov 14th
CU-Boulder physicist Steven Pollock
named a 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year
named a 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year
University of Colorado Boulder physics Professor Steven Pollock has been named a 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Pollock is the second CU-Boulder faculty member to win a national Professor of the Year award. Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, also a physics professor, was honored with the designation in 2004.
POLLOCK WAS NAMED BEST PROFESSOR IN THE COUNTRY FOR 2013
“We are delighted to again have one of our professors named U.S. Professor of the Year,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “Steven Pollock’s work is a credit to him, our physics department and the dynamic teaching and research of our entire faculty.”
The U.S. Professor of the Year awards recognize the most outstanding undergraduate instructors in the country. Each year, a professor is chosen from four institutional categories.
Pollock, who is being honored in the category of doctoral and research universities, was chosen from a field of more than 350 distinguished nominees from across the country.
Pollock began teaching at CU-Boulder in 1993, when he took a job as an assistant professor in the field of theoretical nuclear physics. Over the last two decades, he has taught the full range of physics classes available to undergraduates, from introductory level courses, including the Physics of Sound and Music, to upper-division classes for physics majors, such as Principles of Electricity and Magnetism II, which he is instructing this semester.
“I care a lot about every student in my class, from introductory non-majors to advanced students,” Pollock said. “Some of them start out dreading physics, and it’s a real pleasure watching them turn on to the topic. It’s wonderful to help people see that physics is about their life, that physics is relevant to their future, that it’s interesting, a powerful way of examining the world around them, and that they can do it.”
Pollock says his teaching philosophy is rooted firmly in using strategies that have been proven to work. “Whenever possible, we should use evidence-based research to support whatever we do in class,” he said.
Pollock’s passion for teaching has overflowed into his research career—he now studies the effectiveness of different pedagogical techniques, especially in upper-division physics classes—and has earned him numerous teaching laurels.
Pollock received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in STEM Education, Innovation and Research in 2009; the CU President’s Teaching Scholar award in 2008; the Sigma Pi Sigma Favorite Physics Professor award multiple times; CU-Boulder’s Best Should Teach gold award in 2006; and the Boulder Faculty Assembly Teaching Excellence Award in 1998, among others. He became a Pew-Carnegie National Teaching Scholar in 2001.
Pollock’s teaching successes reflect on the larger culture of CU-Boulder’s Department of Physics, which values effective teaching.
“The people who created the culture that teaching is important were the legends in this department’s history, like Al Bartlett, George Gamow, Jack Kraushaar and John Taylor,” said Professor Paul Beale, chair of the physics department. “They conveyed to the young assistant professors that teaching is rewarding, valued and appreciated.”
CU-Boulder’s physics department has produced four University of Colorado President’s Teaching Scholars.
Pollock is being honored today at a luncheon at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.
This year, a state Professor of the Year award also is being given in 36 states. CU-Boulder has been honored with three state winners in previous years: physics Professor John Taylor in 1989, chemical engineering Professor Klaus Timmerhaus in 1993 and anthropology Professor Dennis Van Gerven in 1998.
CASE and the Carnegie Foundation have been partners in offering the U.S. Professors of the Year awards program since 1981.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center that supports needed transformations in American education through tighter connections between teaching practice, evidence of student learning, the communication and use of this evidence, and structured opportunities to build knowledge.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in London, Singapore and Mexico City, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education is a professional association serving educational institutions and the advancement professionals at all levels who work in alumni relations, communications, fundraising, marketing and other areas.
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Boulder, the country and the world mourn the death of population advocate professor Al Bartlett
Sep 9th
Albert Allen Bartlett, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, was remembered today as a revered teacher who had a major impact on his students, the university, Boulder and far beyond.
Bartlett died on Sept. 7 at the age of 90.
“Al Bartlett was a man of many legacies,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “His commitment to students was evidenced by the fact that he continued to teach for years after his retirement. His timeless, internationally revered lecture on the impacts of world population growth will live beyond his passing, a distinction few professors can claim. And we can all be thankful for his vision and foresight in making the Boulder community what it is today.”
Paul Beale, chair of the CU-Boulder Department of Physics, said “Al Bartlett was a treasured friend, mentor, teacher, scholar and public servant. He was an influential leader in the Department of Physics, the university, the Boulder community and the global environmental movement. Generations of students were proud to have called him ‘Professor.’ ”
Bartlett started teaching at CU-Boulder in 1950 and retired in 1988 but continued to teach CU students for many years afterward. He is a former president of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
When Bartlett first delivered his internationally celebrated lecture on “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” to a group of CU students on Sept. 19, 1969, the world population was about 3.7 billion. He proceeded to give it another 1,741 times in 49 states and seven other countries to corporations, government agencies, professional groups and students from junior high school through college.
His talk warned of the consequences of “ordinary, steady growth” of population and the connection between population growth and energy consumption. Understanding the mathematical consequences of population growth and energy consumption can help clarify the best course for humanity to follow, he said.
The talk contained his most celebrated statement: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” A video of his lecture posted on YouTube has been viewed nearly 5 million times.
This year, the world population is about 7.1 billion and the CU Environmental Center announced a program this summer in which 50 student and community volunteers received training in exchange for a commitment to give Bartlett’s talk at least three times in 2013-14.
Bartlett was a dedicated teacher who reveled in finding better ways to reach his students, whether it was the use of 1-inch diameter railroad chalk that could more easily be seen on a blackboard or the design of a new physics lecture hall. He served on the Boulder Campus Planning Commission for 25 years and chaired the faculty committee responsible for designing the building currently housing the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.
He and Professor Frank C. Walz designed physics lecture halls for the Duane Physical Laboratories Complex that included the innovation of rotating stages. The stages allowed scientific demonstrations to be in use during one class while they were being set up for the next — a process that might take three times as long as the 10 minute period between classes.
In addition to his university work, Bartlett also was a prominent and influential member of the Boulder community. He was an initiator of the effort to preserve Boulder’s open space and also the “Blue Line” amendment that kept houses from being built farther up Boulder’s foothills by restricting the city water supply to a maximum elevation.
As the Daily Camera newspaper wrote when Bartlett received its Pacesetter Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006, “Albert Bartlett’s influence is unmistakable in the foothills surrounding Boulder. With few exceptions, one sees trees, grasses and rock.”
Throughout his decades as a Boulder resident he also was a prodigious writer of op-ed pieces and letters to the editor on a variety of civic and scientific issues.
Bartlett was born on March 21, 1923, in Shanghai, China. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Colgate University and spent two years as an experimental physicist at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project before earning his graduate degrees in physics at Harvard. He then started his teaching career at CU-Boulder.
He won the American Association of Physics Teachers’ Distinguished Service Citation, the Robert A. Millikan Award and the Melba Newell Phillips Award, and served as the society’s national president in 1978. Teaching and service awards from the University of Colorado include Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Awards, the Robert L. Stearns Award, the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University of Colorado Centennial Medallion, the President’s University Service Award, the University Heritage Center Award and the Presidential Citation.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Eleanor, and is survived by their four daughters — Carol, Jane, Lois and Nancy.
A memorial service was being planned to be held in Boulder in October.
The Albert A. Bartlett Scholarship was established in 2010 to aid CU-Boulder physics students who plan to pursue careers teaching high school science. Before his death, Bartlett requested that any memorial gifts be made to the University of Colorado Foundation Albert A. Bartlett Scholarship Fund, in care of the Department of Physics, 390 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, 80309.
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