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RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The following has been published in Physical Review E:
  • D. Statman, E. Page, V. Wener and J. Lombardi, "Photoinduced reorientation of nematic liquid crystals doped with an azo dye: A dynamic and steady-state study of reorientation and loss of liquid crystal order," Phys. Rev. E 75, 021703 (2007)
I have recently submitted three other papers to various journals:
  • E. Page, “Higher-order dynamic effects of continuous wave light on solitons in optical fibers” - Submitted to the Journal of the Optical Society of America B
  • E. Page, S. Manly and V. Roth, “Student perception regarding the helpfulness of different types of physics problems in a student-assisted learning environment at the University of Rochester” - Submitted to the American Journal of Physics
  • E. Page, “The utility of approaching a problem from many perspectives: A yo-yo on a table derived at three different physics levels” - Submitted to the American Journal of Physics
Recent Presentations
  • E. Page, "Student Created Wikis in Introductory Physics." Presented at the American Association of Physics Teachers Winter Meeting in Baltimore, MD, February 5, 2008.
  • E. Page and J. Knowles ('08), "Infused Photonic Crystal Fibers for Protein Analysis." Presented at Fronteirs in Optics, the Anual Meeting of the Optical Society of America in San Jose, CA, September 19, 2007.

Biological Optics and Physics Education Research

My group is currently interested in two very distinct areas of physics: The optical properties of biological systems (biophotonics), and Physics Education Research. I believe each of these subfields are at a point where they will undergo sustained growth for a long period of time. In addition, both are very accessible to undergraduate students and are uniquely suited for study at USD.

I would like to encourage any USD students that have interest in either of these topics as I describe them below, or even just in a more general sense, to contact me. Both fields are highly interdisciplinary. Biological optics is inherently at the crossroads of physics and biology, and it would not be possible to work in each of these fields without incorporating chemistry. Physics education research incorporates ideas from physics as well as education theory and psychology. Therefore, even if you are not a physics major or minor, I would love to chat about my ideas if you are interested.

Optical Properties of Biological Samples

Have you ever taken a small flashlight and pushed it up against one of your thumbs? If you try this you'll notice that your thumb appears to glow red! What is it that makes your thumb glow red when a flashlight giving off white light is near your thumb is at the heart of my research in biological optics.

The answer to this question relatively simple. The white light coming from the flashlight is a combination of light of all different colors combining together (different frequencies), The material inside of your thumb is very good at absorbing most of that light, except the light with the lowest visible frequencies....red light. Since it is only the red light that makes it out the far side of your thumb, that is what you see! The better question is, since we know there is a hard bone in the middle of your thumb, why isn't there a dark spot in the middle of the red light coming through.

The work I am currently doing expands on this idea. Different materials absorb and reflect different colors of light. This is why all the objects in the room around you have the color they do. This process is also true on a molecular level. If you can isolate certain molecules, or groups of molecules, or cells, etc., then you can look at their abilities to absorb and reflect different colors of light. In fact, you can even look at light that is beyond what our eyes can detect. The closest of these extra regions are known as infrared (lower frequencies than our eyes can see) and ultraviolet (higher frequencies than our eyes can see).

This leads me to the other question from before. Why don't you see a dark line representing your bone when you shine a flashlight through your thumb? The answer is that light likes to bounce around a quite a bit. In your thumb, it bounces off of molecules in cells, molecules outside of cells....in fact, light pretty much bounces off on anything that gets in its way. Since the light bounces around so much in biological tissue you tend to lose a lot of the detail of what it went through, like bone. (We call this kind of light diffuse light, as in it has diffused all throughout.)

This is where my research comes in. In the past, I have done quite a bit of work with optical fibers. Optical fibers are long, hair-thin strands of glass that can trap light inside of them, using total internal reflection, so that the light will travel down the fiber with all of its twists and turns. Optical fibers can be found almost everywhere now, from communication lines (long distance calls), to endoscopes (taking pictures inside blood vessels), to all kinds of detectors (including vibration detectors for bridges and poison gas detectors used by the army). One of the ways I used to work with them is photodynamic therapy, which is a cancer treatment that uses light to kill cancer cells.

There is a very new class of optical fiber called a photonic crystal fiber. Photonic crystal fibers are similar to standard optical fibers, except that they have a number of holes that run down the length of the fiber. (You can see a cross- section of one of these types of fibers in the figure to the right.) These fibers have such unique properties that they are quickly becoming one of the most talked about research tools in optics today, but I won't get into much of that right now.

What I want to do is put these two things together. Since the holes in photonic crystal fibers are just that, holes, they could be filled with solutions of almost anything we want. I plan to fill these holes with different types of biological materials and then test their optical properties by sending light down the fiber and look at what comes out the other side. What is so great about these fibers is that 1) we know where the biological molecules are because they are trapped in the fiber, and 2) since the light has the stay in the fiber, the light becomes much less diffuse and we can get more information out of it.

I am very excited about this project, and it is something that no one has done before. So, if you have some interest in working on a project that is very new, has a lot of potential, and is at the crossroads of physics and biology, please come by and lets chat!

Physics Education Research at USD

In the 1980's several studies suggested that students weren't walking away from introductory physics courses with the same type of information and knowledge as their teachers and professors assumed they were. The results showed that in general, students were doing very well at learning how to manipulate and use equations to solve problems without gaining a strong understanding of the physics behind it. These few sentences make a very long and interesting story quite short, but the crux of these studies laid the foundation for what is now known as Physics Education Research; that is, research done in physics departments across the country, and indeed around the world, into what has been 'wrong' with physics courses, what does actually work, and what are the best ways that we can go about changing the way we run our courses to help out students learn the concepts that underlie physics better.

I have been involved in physics education research since 1999, when I was a teaching assistant for a large introductory level physics course at a major research university. That course tested the effectiveness of standard recitations (question and answer sessions by a teaching assistant) and workshops (cooperative learning environments where students work on problems in groups). The results of that course (strongly in favor of the workshop model) were so striking that I wanted to not only use these new methods, but also be a part of finding and developing even better ways to teach physics.

My research in this area focuses mostly on students' motivations and expectations in all phases of an introductory physics course: entering the course, throughout the course, and at the end of the course. I am looking at ways to increase student motivation at the outset, determine motivation levels and direction during the course, and what factors may change students' overall feelings towards physics after the course (including final exams).

In order to look at these questions, I have one ongoing project and two others that are in the early stages of development:

  • Direct assessment of student motivations and expectations (M&E) throughout the course. In this project, I have been using well-tested surveys such as the Maryland Physics Expectation Survey (MPEX) and the Views About Science Survey (VASS) to determine how students' motivations and expectations change not only at the beginning of the course and the end of the course, but also at times during the semester. Early results suggest that students' M&E tend to become more favorable, but then take a dip near the end of the semester. This is an ongoing project that will combine data from USD with previous and current data from other schools.
  • Development of a Conceptual Survey of Biology in Introductory Physics (CSBIP). Many schools currently have an introductory physics course geared towards life science majors and pre-health students. This survey, similar in style to the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) intentionally redescribes standard physics examples in biological settings. Not only do we feel this could be a good barometer for course pre-post testing, but could also serve to form an internal motivation for life science students taking physics courses. This project is in the early stages of development.
  • Direct assessment of final exams on student gains in a physics course. Early results of my first project above have suggested that the stress of final exams may be causing an overall decrease in the positive gains of non-physics majors in introductory physics courses. This project aims to test this hypothesis, as well as determine means of circumventing the negative effect of final exams or suggest other methods of final evaluation.

Each of these long-term projects have numerous sub-projects that would be well suited for a one-semester or one-year undergraduate project. In fact, such projects are being designed to support USD Physics Departments proposed track supporting students who plan to teach high school physics. In addition, work on these projects could be a strong addition to a CV for a student looking to pursue graduate school in a program with a strong teaching component.