I am the author of four books, which include two astronomy books and two education books. Below are brief summaries of each – and links for purchasing them on the publisher’s website and also links for getting the book – both print and kindle versions – on Amazon.
The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century
Reimagining higher education around the world: lessons from the creation of eight new colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America.
Higher education is perpetually in crisis, buffeted by increasing costs and a perceived lack of return on investment, campus culture that is criticized for stifling debate on controversial topics, and a growing sense that the liberal arts are outmoded and irrelevant. Some observers even put higher education on the brink of death. The New Global Universities offers a counterargument, telling the story of educational leaders who have chosen not to give up on higher education but to reimagine it. The book chronicles the development and launch of eight innovative colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America, describing the combination of intellectual courage, entrepreneurial audacity, and adaptive leadership needed to invent educational institutions today.
From Princeton University Press:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691231495/the-new-global-universities
Models of Time and Space from Astrophysics and World Cultures: The Foundations of Astrophysical Reality from Across the Centuries (Astronomers’ Universe).
Models of Time and Space from Astrophysics and World Cultures explores how our conceptions of time, space, and the physical universe have evolved across cultures throughout the centuries. Developed with a humanistic approach, this book blends historical sources, biographical profiles of exceptional scientists, and the latest discoveries in both astrophysics and particle physics. This rich read describes the incredible insights and ultimate limits of our knowledge, the physical universe, and how ideas old and new have converged, across the world, to build our current understanding of reality. From the Large Hadron Collider to the James Webb Space Telescope, we have mapped the universe from the smallest to largest scales; allowing us to gain fundamental knowledge that has transformed our understanding of the universe.
From Springer, Inc. –https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-27890-7
STEM Education for the 21st Century
This book chronicles the revolution in STEM teaching and learning that has arisen from a convergence of educational research, emerging technologies, and innovative ways of structuring both the physical space and classroom activities in STEM higher education. Beginning with a historical overview of US higher education and an overview of diversity in STEM in the US, the book sets a context in which our present-day innovation in science and technology urgently needs to provide more diversity and inclusion within STEM fields. Research-validated pedagogies using active learning and new types of research-based curriculum are transforming how physics, biology, and other fields are taught in leading universities, and the book gives profiles of leading innovators in science education and examples of exciting new research-based courses taking root in US institutions. The book includes interviews with leading scientists and educators, case studies of new courses and new institutions, and descriptions of site visits where new trends in 21st-century STEM education are being developed. The book also takes the reader into innovative learning environments in engineering where students are empowered by emerging technologies to develop new creative capacity in their STEM education, through new centers for design thinking and liberal arts-based engineering. The emergence of exponentially advancing technologies such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and materials sciences has been described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the book explores how these technologies will shape our future and bring a transformation of STEM curriculum that can help students solve many the most urgent problems facing our world and society.
From Springer, Inc. – https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-41633-1
The Power of Stars
Completely revised and updated, this new edition provides a readable, beautifully illustrated journey through world cultures and the vibrant array of sky mythology, creation stories, models of the universe, temples and skyscrapers that each culture has created to celebrate and respond to the power of the night sky. Sections on the archaeoastronomy of South Asia and South East Asia have been expanded, with original photography and new research on temple alignments in Southern India, and new material describing the astronomical practices of Indonesia, Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries. Beautiful photographs of temples in India and Asia have been added, as well as new diagrams explaining the alignment of these structures and the astronomical underpinnings of temples within the Pallava and Chola cultures. From new fieldwork in the Four Corners region of North America, Dr. Penprase has included accounts of Pueblo skywatching and photographs of ceremonial kivas that help elucidate the rich astronomical knowledge of the Pueblo people. The popular “Archaeoastronomy of Skyscrapers” section of the book has been updated as well, with new interpretations of skyscrapers in Indonesia, Taiwan and China.With the rapid pace of discovery in astronomy and astrophysics, entirely new perspectives are emerging about dark matter, inflation and the future of the universe. The Power of Stars puts these discoveries in context and describes how they fit into the modern perspective of cosmology, which has arisen from the universal human response to the sky that has inspired both ancient and modern cultures.
- Thoroughly updated second edition of a well-reviewed and widely used text
- New additions include material drawn from the author’s fieldwork in various places around the world, as well as an improved index
- Concise explanation of constellation lore from around the world, organized by cultures
- A graphic and wide-ranging discussion of models of the universe, which includes schematic figures from over a dozen cultures
- Precise and compelling descriptions of a wide range of celestial monuments with quantitative analysis of the significance of some of the monuments from the perspective of a trained astrophysicist
From Springer, Inc. – https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-52597-6
Below is a link from Amazon to the second (2017) edition, but also shows the first edition (2010) cover.