My Research
My research has predominantly focused on improving graduate physics education and studying the ways that professional physicists solve problems in their real-world research environments. Exploring these topics has allowed me to use a variety of quantitative (e.g., regression, ANOVA, mediation analysis) and qualitative (e.g., semi-structured interviews, qualitative coding) research methods. Blending these skills has allowed our group create a novel analysis pipeline for qualitative data that allows us to visually organize codes in a virtual environment… maybe someday we’ll write a methods paper about it!
In addition to the peer-reviewed publications and conference proceedings listed below, we’ve had several ongoing projects led by summer undergraduate researchers investigating how faculty across STEM disciplines use computation in their research.
Visit my Google Scholar page here!
Peer-reviewed publications
September 2024:
Modeling when and how physics PhD students search for a research group: the role of interests and prior research experiences in timely group integration [Published in PRPER, Editors’ Suggestion]
September 2024:
Beyond The Big Bang Theory: Revealing the everyday research lives of theoretical physics faculty [Published in The Physics Teacher]
November 2023:
Physics PhD student perspectives on the importance and difficulty of finding a research group [Published in PRPER, Editors’ Suggestion, Featured in Physics Magazine]
December 2022:
Making expert processes visible: how and why theorists use assumptions and analogies in their research [Published in PRPER]
August 2021:
Analyzing admissions metrics as predictors of graduate GPA and whether graduate GPA mediates Ph.D. completion [Published in PRPER, Editors’ Suggestion, Featured in Physics Magazine]
May 2018:
Exploring extra dimensions with scalar fields [Published in Am J Phys]
Peer-reviewed conference proceedings
August 2023:
Inequities and misaligned expectations in PhD students’ search for a research group
August 2022:
Making expert cognitive processes visible: planning and preliminary analysis in theoretical physics research
August 2021:
Time to PhD completion is no different between men and women despite score gap on physics GRE
Student Publications
August 2023:
Tools for Understanding the Microscopic World of Quantum Mechanics: Analogies in Textbooks
Mike Verostek 