The engineering physics program enrolls 40 majors and additional minors, and the numbers are increasing. The program became focused on engineering physics four years ago and has a strong applied physics component, with cutting edge courses offered by faculty with excellent preparation and expertise. The program maintains reciprocal agreements with a local community college and New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The goal of this project is to further develop the Ramapo College physics program, especially in undergraduate research. This project is adding a laboratory in Medical Physics dedicated to the Medical Physics course, a growing area of interest. The goal of the laboratory is to create hands-on skills in the particular field of applied physics, to enhance students' understanding of the topic, and to create research opportunities at the undergraduate level for juniors and seniors. The laboratory is helping to create opportunities for faculty and students to do cutting-edge physics and strengthen the engineering physics curriculum.
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this project consists of the development of new laboratory curriculum components in the fields of Medical Physics. This laboratory is unique for the public colleges of the state of NJ at the undergraduate level. The new laboratory environment fosters faculty development and faculty-guided undergraduate research in new areas of science and technology.
Broader Impacts: By creating the needed research and laboratory environments, this project addresses the nationwide problem that students have too little experience with frontier physics topics. Findings are being disseminated through physics education and research papers and presentations at national and international conferences. At yearly meetings with the Council of Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the project is reaching four-year colleges and engaging them in a conversation about similar engineering physics curricula. Locally, the project is collaborating with Rockland Community College as well as New Jersey Institute of Technology, to offer laboratory and course offerings to their physics and engineering students.
The goal of this TEUS proposal was to develop an advanced 400-level teaching/research laboratory focused on the field of Medical Physics. The goal of each laboratory was to create hands-on skills in the medical physics, to enhance student’s understanding of the topic and to create research opportunities at the undergraduate level for the junior and senior students. This laboratory helps faculty enhance their research expertise and creates opportunity for grant writing and publications. Overall, this laboratory created a much stronger research and experimental component for the engineering physics curriculum. The objectives of this proposal are: 1. To strengthen the engineering physics curriculum by developing an advanced teaching/research laboratory relevant to Medical Physics 2. To enhance student understanding of the topics by creating the experimental environment to test theoretical concepts. To test their understanding and acquired hands-on skills by conducting a practical exam at the end of each semester. To assess the organization, content and procedure for each set of measurements by seeking written student feedback at the end of each session using a student feedback form 3. To create research opportunities for students and faculty and enhance faculty development The outcomes of this proposal are: A stronger research and experimental component within the engineering program measurable by: 1. Testable hands-on skills for the undergraduate student in the areas of detection of ionizing radiation and radioactive decay, fundamentals of nuclear magnetic resonance The instructor developed 5 laboratory research areas and 12 laboratory measurements that are taught to the students as part of a newly created course, PHYS-431 experimental Methods in Physcs. The course has been offered twice in te past 2 years for a total of 36 students. The research areas are: Gamma Spectroscopy using a NaI(Tl) scintillation detectors, pulsed NMR at 0.3 T, Color Doppler Ultrasound measurements, X-Ray crystallography and X-ray based study of material properties and High Temperature Superconductivity measurements using SQUIDS. The manual of the laboratory component of the course is attached. 2. Design, complete and present small research projects in the junior and senior years that will eventually lead to the requirement of a senior year experimental or theoretical thesis. Over the length of the grant, 12 students have been involved in developing small research projects in medical physics and their results have been presented at two local research symposia, two national conferences and one international conference. Twelsve students have received sumer internships, partly based on the skills acquired in this course. 3. Support faculty instruction in advanced physics workshops that allow immediate integration of new measurements and systems in our curriculum (such as the ALPHA Immersion workshops described earlier). Create research opportunities for faculty by creating a research laboratory environment with advanced set-ups. The PI had enrolled into an Alpha immersion workshop at Caltech, August 2013 and added one more laboratory set of measurements to the advanced research laboratory, measurements using a lock-in amplifier to detect small signals. The PI also completed a Comsol software training courses in order to beging offering Comsol instruction as part of the stuent research experience. The PI has one paper under review for publication, three poster papers presented at national and one international conference and one oral presentation at a national conference.
