December 2025: Randall Tagg

About Randall

Physics seems to have been ingrained in me since elementary school. In sixth grade, I was puzzled about the relationship between electric currents and light and I did a science fair project with a classmate on solar concentrators for cooking. I was then also able to take formal physics courses earlier than normal when I attended a school in London, England during my early teenage years. This was in the 1960s so I was aware of solar panels on satellites but had little knowledge of how they worked. Growing up with the space program (I was born two years before Sputnik) certainly was a major factor in my pursuit of physics and it was a dream come true to work for Taylor Wang at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. I had many other superb mentors including undergraduate advisor Robbie Vogt at Caltech, PhD advisor Tom Greytak at MIT, and postdoc advisor Harry Swinney at UT Austin. All of them instilled in me a keen desire to teach physics and to support undergraduate research in my fields of nonlinear dynamics and fluid mechanics.

I joined AAPT soon after arriving at CU Denver in 1990. Our region has an active group called the Denver Area Physics Teachers^† and it was a pleasure to meet Mario Iona and his son Steven at Denver University (DU) at the DAPT sessions. Professor Iona may have taught physics to my father at DU years before I was born! Colleagues at CU-Denver and Metropolitan State University of Denver also encouraged my participation in AAPT. I combed through 30 years of the American Journal of Physics and the Physics Teacher to hand-type a bibliography of papers on advanced laboratory teaching, a compilation that I shared at an APPT-affiliated meeting called Labfocus in 1993 in Boise, Idaho. Ever since then, I have been informed and energized by colleagues at AAPT meetings. I was also thrilled when the Advanced Laboratory Physics Association (ALPhA) launched at the APS March Meeting here in Denver in 2007.

I am passionate about teaching students how to translate knowledge and skills from physics courses, physics labs, and undergraduate research experiences into real-world applications of physics. A research project by a student John Starrett controlled a chaotic pendulum and this led to funding from the Office of Naval Research to explore how to stabilize loads swinging from cranes on ships. Many years later a student Caleb Carr evolved this project into a company called Vita Inclinata that produces technology to stabilize helicopter rescue and construction crane hoists. Another student, Will Fitzhugh, launched a company called American Nanotechnologies for purifying single-walled carbon nanotubes to use in biomedical sensors. These are examples of what I call “Physics for Humans”, the name of the Community that AAPT has given me the privilege to form this year. I hope that colleagues will use this forum to show ways to increase student awareness of the power of physics to help solve important regional and global problems. My goal now is to retire “into” the creation of a special facility called the Hyperlab to support K-12 and college students pursuing projects within this theme. I have a host of stored technical resources for students to use and department support for the development of modules for learning the necessary technical competencies. Does anyone have an empty warehouse?

 ^† The Denver Area Physics Teachers now encompasses a wider region and is called the Colorado Area Physics Teachers (CAPT). Even our neighbors in Wyoming are included!