Larry Engelhardt2021 National Board of Directors Election Candidate for Four-Year College Representative

Larry Engelhardt

Department of Physics and Engineering, Francis Marion University, Florence, SC 29502
lengelhardt@fmarion.edu

Education

  • BA Gustavus Adolphus College, 2000, Physics
  • PhD Iowa State University, Physics, 2006

Professional Experience

Francis Marion University:  Assistant Professor (200-2011); Associate Professor (2011 – 2016), and Professor of Physics (2016 – )

Awards

  • FMU Distinguished Professor (2020)
  • AAPT Citation for Distinguished Service (2019)
  • AAPT Area Committee of the Year (2018 as Committee Chair)
  • FMU Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship (2014)
  • Iowa State University Graduate Teaching Award (2005)

Memberships

  • American Association of Physics Teachers
  • Southern Atlantic Coast Section of the AAPT (SACS-AAPT)
  • American Physical Society, Southeastern Section of the APS (SESAPS)
  • Partnership for the Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP)
  • APS Physics For Tomorrow working group
  • the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi

Leadership Positions

  • PICUP Leadership Council (2011 – Present) and PICUP Editorial Board (2016–Present)
  • FMU Secretary of the Faculty (2012 – 2016)
  • Co-editor, Book Review Department of Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE), a joint publication of the AIP and the IEEE (2009 – 2014) and CiSE Editorial Board member (2009 – 2016)
  • President, FMU chapter of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society (2011–2012)

AAPT Activities

  • Southern Atlantic Coast Section (SACS-AAPT): President (2017 – 2018) and Vice-President (2016 – 2017)
  • AAPT Committee on Educational Technologies: Chair (2017 – 2018) and Vice-Chair (2016-2017)
  • Frequent reviewer and author for AAPT publications TPT and AJP
  • Have attended several AAPT-sponsored workshops, including:  AAPT Topical Conference on Computational Physics for Upper-Level Courses (3-day workshop at Davidson, NC, 2007);  Activity-Based Physics Faculty Institute (week-long workshop at Dickinson College, PA, 2008);  AAPT New Faculty Workshop (4-day workshop at College Park, MD, 2008); Next Gen PET FOLC Workshop (3-day workshop in Cincinnati, OH, 2017)

Statement

I have been an AAPT member since 2008, and I haven’t missed a national meeting of the AAPT since 2013.  I have organized numerous AAPT sessions and workshops, have given numerous invited and contributed presentations, and have served as chair of the Committee on Educational Technologies.  The AAPT has been extremely influential in making me a better teacher, and I think there would be significant opportunities for me to contribute to the AAPT as a member of the AAPT Board.

At each AAPT meeting, there is a “Program Committee” meeting wherein all of the sessions and workshops are approved for the meeting that will take place one year later.  When I was chair of the AAPT Committee on Educational Technologies, I introduced the use of shared google sheets for these meetings instead of relying strictly on oversized post-it notes and markers.  This is one example of how modern technology can help the process of planning meetings, but as a member of the board I would like to help the AAPT to further improve and modernize all of the aspects of this planning.

As one of the leaders of the PICUP organization, I worked with the PICUP editors, and with Lyle Barbato (the AAPT Physics Digital Library Web Developer) to develop and implement the precise editorial review process for the PICUP Collection.  This is a complex process that involves interactions between authors, editors, and reviewers; and this process needs to be able to unfold in several different ways depending on the feedback from reviewers, decisions from editors, etc.  We developed and refined the desired “editorial flow diagram” to describe this process, created the appropriate web content to support this desired flow, and created numerous automated emails to be sent out to the appropriate people (authors, editors, and reviewers) at each stage of this process.  Planning the sessions and workshops for an AAPT meeting is unavoidably complex as there are always two meetings being planned at the same time and a large number of people are involved.  To support this planning of AAPT meetings, we need to develop a system that is  analogous to the PICUP editorial system, and I would like to help to support the development of such a system.

I am honored to be nominated for the AAPT Board, and I look forward to helping to support this very important organization in any way that I can.  Given my experiences, I expect to be able to contribute to the AAPT Board on a variety of fronts.  This includes the effective use of technology as described above, but it is important that I also have experience leading an AAPT Section, I know how AAPT Area Committees work, I have been a leader of PICUP – to have experience with the relationship between AAPT and its partner organizations – and I have been a long-time consumer of the great programs and resources that AAPT has to offer.