My PECASE speech...

 

I would like start by thanking the NSF for giving me this wonderful opportunity. In particular, I am very thankful to Dr. Earle Lomon for his encouragement and advice.

Once upon a time there was a big bang. Shortly afterward, when all the stuff of the universe was crammed in a volume this big, it was made entirely out of quark gluon plasma. The fluid flow of this plasma is important for determining how the universe got the way that it is.

How amazing is it that we are living in the time - 13 billion years later - when experiments at Brookhaven National Lab are showing us how this fluid behaves! How viscous is it? How plasma like? Figuring this stuff out requires collaboration of nuclear theorists - like me - with the thousands of experimenters at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

These experiments smash gold nuclei together, producing thousands of particles. The research component of my proposal is to figure out how to deduce the properties of the quark gluon plasma formed in these collisions.

For example, I'm studying the “fluidity” of the plasma by studying particle correlations. The close correlation of atoms is how chemists distinguish liquid water from steam. And I'm studying how the plastma coalesced into the protons and neutrons that make up almost everything you see in this room.

This sounds like a galaxy far far away, but meanwhile I work at Wayne State University in Detroit. My outreach efforts are aimed at helping the disadvantaged youth of my city by enriching science education for students studying to be grade school and high school teachers at Wayne State's College of Education.

Before my CAREER proposal, I'd already been working with pre-service and in-service teachers taking part in Wayne State's NSF funded Research Experience for Teachers program.

So for my CAREER grant, I decided to develop a course for teachers in-training in which case-studies of real science research projects will be used to illustrate and bring to life the process of scientific discovery. Traditional science courses focus on explaining scientific results. The case studies will illustrate the dynamic nature of the scientific process. Really, I want to show the students - who will themselves become teachers - how much fun we are having in our very cool jobs!

I would like to thank my wife Kara for putting up with the meshugas that finally got us to Michigan; my colleagues at Wayne and Brookhaven, especially Maria Ferrara of the College of Education; and, of course, I would be nowhere without my grad students, especially Dave Bower and Mohamed Abdel-Aziz.