After a fantastic interview and visit to beautiful Aliso Viejo, CA, I have been given the opportunity and honor to become the next Dean of Faculty for Soka University of America! The opportunity is very exciting as it includes a chance to join a dynamic and creative intellectual community as they provide a unique and excellent […]
Day 2 of our STEM Innovation Symposium included a number of fantastic talks by Carl Wieman, Nobel laureate in Physics, as well as plenary talks by Bob Kamei of NUS, who leads a new center at NUS known as ALSET, and by Adrian Lee, who helped create the NUS Special Programme in Science, and who […]
Day 1 of our STEM conference on April 27 featured a number of remarkable presentations, which were kicked off by a talk by Drew Endy (Stanford) entitled “Learning by Doing – Lessons from the Frontiers of Engineering and Biology.” The slides for that lecture are online at this site: https://www.slideshare.net/DrewEndy/learning-bioengineering-by-doing. In the talk, Drew focused on […]
Our Yale-NUS Centre for Teaching and Learning sponsored a conference on STEM Innovation in Singapore on April 27 and 28, and we arranged a very interesting set of sessions from leading educators from across Singapore, with speakers from NUS, Yale-NUS, NTU, SUTD, and other Singapore institutions, as well as visitors from Stanford University. Our keynote speaker, […]
After classes finished at Yale-NUS College, I made a visit to two of my favourite cities in India, Bangalore (home of the Raman Research Institute and IIHS), and Pune (home to the IUCAA astrophysics Institute). The trip to Bangalore and Pune allowed me to meet with some of my collaborators both in astrophysics and from our […]
As part of my work as Director of the Yale-NUS Teaching and Learning Center, I ran several workshops for faculty on creating teaching portfolios. The faculty of Yale-NUS College work hard on developing innovative common curriculum courses, conducting world-class scholarship and building an entirely new undergraduate college in Asia offering an innovative liberal arts approach to […]
One of the most exciting discoveries of the past few years is the detection of gravitational radiation using the LIGO interferometer. These magnificent machines have been developed over more than 20 years, led by Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne at MIT and Caltech. After such a long period of development, it is wonderful to see […]
As our data from the NGC 5643 supernova continues to come in, we are building up an ever better light curve from our Supernova! The Type Ia supernova is caused by a white dwarf star collapsing and creating a cornucopia of new elements – Nickel, Iron, Cobalt, and also Gold, Platinum and other heavy elements. […]
On March 28-31 I had the opportunity to represent Yale-NUS College at the Coursera Partners Conference in Boulder, CO. Richard Levin, the Coursera CEO, suggested that I attend, as I was planning to work with him and Coursera during my scheduled sabbatical for Fall 2017. The meeting included all the leading online course developers, and offered […]
During March 19-24 we hosted Lucas Swineford, The Executive Director of Digital Education and Dissemination at Yale University. We hosted Lucas at Yale-NUS College to discuss technology enhanced teaching and to explore new ways of using digital media and flipped classes in our Yale-NUS curriculum. Lucas gave a wonderful talk about the developments at the […]