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Jonathan Perry Is 2025 Doc Brown Futures Award Recipient

Jonathan D. Perry Will Receive 2025 Doc Brown Futures Award Recipient

Jonathan Perry

AAPT has announced that the 2025 recipient of the Doc Brown Futures Award is Jonathan Perry. The Doc Brown Futures Award recognizes early-career members who demonstrate excellence in their contributions to AAPT and physics education and exhibit the potential to serve in an AAPT leadership role. The award will be presented during the 2025 Winter Meeting.

"I am very delighted to receive this award. AAPT meetings are some of my favorite events each year for both the content and the community. I look forward to the opportunities this award provides for potentially making bigger contributions to the organization in the future!" said Perry.

A member of AAPT since 2016, he earned a B.A. and M.S. in Physics at Baylor University and a Ph.D. in Physics at Texas A & M University. Perry is an Assistant Professor of Instruction, in the Department of Physics at the University of Texas Austin.

A regular attendee of AAPT’s national meetings, Perry has proven to be a talented teacher, an accomplished researcher, and a dedicated student mentor. He has taken on several early leadership roles serving on the Committee for Science Education for the Public (CSEP), including being Vice Chair (2022) and Chair (2023) and well as serving on the Meetings Planning Committee. He has organized multiple sessions for national conferences in recent years and serves as a reviewer for multiple journals including Physical Review PER and The Physics Teacher.

Perry joined the Physics Education Research (PER) community as a graduate student developing both his teaching and research talents in parallel. His students describe him as “extremely supportive and willing to listen. He also encourages us to reach out of our comfort zone in order to reach our max potential”, and as being “really good at explaining things in a way we all could understand.” Having a superb reputation in the department, Perry taught introductory lectures, supported a summer boarding program for high school physics teachers, and received the highest graduate student award at Texas A&M for his teaching. In research, Perry demonstrated his abilities to generate ideas and creative suggestions to approaching problems, being instrumental in developing and studying a new self-study resources named “Freshman Physics Classroom” The results were published in the American Journal of Physics.

Beginning in graduate school, Perry also developed a passion for informal physics outreach programs. He regularly worked with Texas A&M’s Physics & Engineering Festival, Real Physics Live, sponsored by APS outreach grants, and the Discover, Explore, and Enjoy Physics and Engineering program. In this last program, graduate students like Perry lead small teams of undergraduates on researching, designing, and fabricating exciting science demonstration experiments. The demonstrations are also used in regular courses as well as outreach events. Perry has continued his efforts by developing a course at UT Austin modeled on the demo building program, and is a co-coordinator of Physics on the Rocks, a program which delivers engaging talks about science to the public once a month in Austin.

As an Assistant Professor of Instruction at UT Austin, Perry continues to bring excellence to both his and his colleagues’ classrooms by sharing innovative teaching methods learned at AAPT meetings and through a departmental professional development program. He was recognized for his teaching efforts with his college’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2023. Perry also trains both undergraduate and graduate students in teaching roles through pedagogy courses and workshops. Though he focuses primarily on teaching, Perry continues his PER efforts and has proven to be a superb advisor. Results of multiple projects, primarily working with undergraduate research students, have been presented and well received at the 2019-2024 Summer and Winter AAPT Meetings, 2022-2023 APS April Meeting, and at 2021-2023 PERC conferences.

About the Award
Robert William Brown (Distinguished University and Institute Professor in the physics department at Case Western Reserve University) has had a rewarding five-decade career in teaching, research, and entrepreneurship. An Inaugural Fellow of the AAPT, Doc Brown is associated with a number of educational innovations, including an early use of a fiberoptics electronic educational environment (1980s), of an early use of undergraduate teaching assistants (1990s), of published PER work on both “post-exam syndrome” and its treatment, and “cycling” or structured revisiting of classroom material. His teaching led to the writing of a thousand-page MRI textbook, which has been called the "daily companion of the MRI scientist.” Doc Brown has received five regional national teaching honors on his innovations in undergraduate and graduate teaching, and in 2004 received the AAPT Excellence in Undergraduate Physics Teaching National Award. A partnership with his wife, Janet Gans Brown has taken them to highlight the importance of AAPT in a shared life and their gratitude by this endowment.

About AAPT
AAPT is the premier international organization for physics educators, physicists, and industrial scientists—with members worldwide. Dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of physics through teaching, AAPT provides awards, publications, and programs that encourage practical application of physics principles, support continuing professional development, and reward excellence in physics education. AAPT was founded in 1930 and is headquartered in the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland.