August 2024: Beth Thacker

About Beth

The truth is that in high school, I wanted to be an astronaut. I decided that in order to be an astronaut, I should major in science in college. Since I liked math, I decided physics was the science with the most math in it, so I should major in physics. After the first day of physics in college, I realized that we had basically just covered all of my high school physics knowledge, and everything would be new from there. I thought I was going to flunk out. But I stuck with it.

I worked for three years at Bell Laboratories after my undergraduate degree from Davidson College and then pursued a Ph.D. from Cornell University. My Ph.D. was in high energy theory, studying heavy quark-bound states in lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). During my postdoctoral research in QCD at The Ohio State University (OSU), a non-local friend called another postdoc at OSU and said Kenneth Wilson (1982 Nobel Prize) was getting into education and suggested looking into what he was doing. I got interested. I first observed and later started teaching the Physics by Inquiry course developed by the University of Washington. After significant thought, I switched fields to Physics Education Research (PER).

(Oh, and by the way, I had glasses by then, and they weren’t accepting astronaut candidates with vision worse than 20/40 -- at that time.)

After switching fields, it was suggested I attend an AAPT meeting. It was amazing! It was a community of people interested in teaching and learning, and everyone was very helpful and supportive. And it is still like that today!

I spent five years as a faculty at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and then moved to Texas Tech University, where I am today. I developed a laboratory-based, inquiry-based curriculum (INQ) taught using Socratic questioning pedagogy and have done significant work investigating students' qualitative and quantitative understanding of physics concepts in courses taught by traditional and non-traditional methods. Present work includes assessing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of Learning Assistants (LAs) in an inquiry-based physics class, assessing students' thinking skills across pedagogies, graduate students' understanding of symmetry and conservation laws in classical mechanics, and students' understanding of Quantum Computing (QC) at the undergraduate level. I am most excited about teaching and research in QC and the development and assessment of an upper-level undergraduate QC course.

I have enjoyed the support of not just the national AAPT but also the Michigan and Texas sections of AAPT. I have served (and still serve in TX) in officer roles in both of those locations.