Educating Brian

I gained my love of and first training in Physics and Math at my high school, a small, elderly, grammar school in a rural part of the East Midlands of England that had a number of formidably good teachers and history of sending a solid stream of students on to Oxford and Cambridge; the nearest England has to Ivy league schools.

I went on to read (English for study) Natural Sciences at St. John's College, Cambridge whence I graduated in 1978 with a BA in Physics, having specialised in solid state theory. It was at Cambridge that I first saw that teaching physics could be a life in itself, largely through working with my supervisors, especially Dr. Stephen Gull. It was also at Cambridge that I first met an American professor from a liberal arts college and first learned of the existence of the kind of institution that I have come to love.

Having met an American working on a second BA at Cambridge (the professor was her father), I followed her back to the US to marry and to go to graduate school, studying Biophysics at Princeton. There I was able to apply long time interests in biology, electronics, and computing to physical problems as I built X-ray detectors and studied the relation between molecular structure and physiological function in frog muscle.

I left Princeton in the summer of 1982, having handed in my thesis but not defended it, to spend a year teaching at Mt. Holyoke college. During that year I successfully defended my thesis and was awarded my Ph.D. in Physics and I confirmed my intention to make teaching at such an institution my career. The department was wonderful to me and I got to work with a fantastic group of students whom I remember fondly to this day.

From Mt.Holyoke I went to spend three years at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, performing post-doctoral research on muscle ultra-structure. These were three busy, enjoyable years during which I learned a lot of physiology and met a group of wonderful people but I missed the contact with students that I had grown to love at Mt.Holyoke.