Edward F. (Joe) Redish

April 1, 1942 - August 24, 2024 (age 82)

Edward “Joe” Redish, a popular professor of physics at the University of Maryland, died of cancer on August 24, 2024. Globally recognized as a pioneer in the field of physics education research, Joe was most proud of his role in helping to build the field into a thriving international community.

He taught physics at the University of Maryland in College Park for more than 50 years, including a stint as department chair when Maryland had the third largest physics department in the nation.

Joe came to Maryland after graduating Magna Cum Laude from Princeton University and earning his Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics from M.I.T.

He joined the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) in 1991 and was actively involved in the organization serving on the American Journal of Physics (AJP) Editorial Staff as editor of the Physics Education Research Section from 1993-2003, In 1993 Redish and Lillian C. McDermott published Resource Letter: PER-1: Physics Education Research. Over 30 years he published more than 200 articles in AJP.

His work was also published in The Physics Teacher. The January 2024 issue included an installment in Redish’s series on “Using Math in Physics,” a series that includes some of the most popular (read, most-often downloaded) articles in recent years.

He was a leader in helping building the Physics Education Research (PER) community, serving on the PER Leadership Organizing Council, editing the first PER journal and organizing major conferences including the first on Computers in Physics Education (1988), a major international meeting on Physics Education (1996), and the first (and so far only) Fermi International Summer School on PER (2003).

USA Liaison Committee-International Union of Pure & Applied Physics (2002), the AIP Advisory Committee on Physics Education (2002), and the USA National Liaison Committee of International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (2001),

With a strong team of collaborators led by Priscilla Laws, he pioneered a new approach to university physics instruction, The Physics Suite, a synergistic combination of research-based active learning materials and a rewrite of a popular text to blend it with other activities and to modify it to respond to what has been learned from physics education research. He has also created online problems collections for introductory (Thinking Problems in Physics) and advanced physics (Thinking Problems in Mathematical Physics). Redish was also lead developer on an HHMI project to develop a new physics course for biology majors and pre-medical students (Project NEXUS).

In 2010, Redish received funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for the National Experiment in Undergraduate Science Education (NEXUS) and created Physics 131/132. This sequence was designed for students planning careers in medicine and bioscience, who will better understand chemical and biological processes with a solid foundation in physics. It is a core element of the multi-university, multi-million dollar National Science Foundation (NSF) project, The Living Physics Portal, a national web resource for organizing, evaluating, and sharing materials for physics classes for life science students.

He has been a mentor to a large number of physics education researchers and has supervised more than thirty graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in physics education research and nuclear physics.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the AAAS, and the Washington Academy of Science and has received awards for his work in education from the Washington Academy of Science, the Maryland Association for Higher Education, Dickinson College, Vanderbilt University, the Robert A. Millikan Medal (2005) from the AAPT, a 2005 NSF Director's Award as a Distinguished Teaching Scholar, the Medal of the International Commission on Physics Education, the 2012 ICPE Medal at the World Conference on Physics Education, AAPT’s Hans Christian Oersted Medal in 2013, and most recently, in 2014 he was recognized as an AAPT Fellow.

Read more: