Physics for the Common Good

A Conversation with Catherine Crouch, Professor of Physics, Swarthmore College

November 18th, 2024
7:30 pm EST in person at Willard Straight Hall 404 (Browsing Library)
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Might there be unintended consequences to our increasingly STEM-focused curriculum today? But might there also be benefits to this STEM focus that we had not realized? In short, the natural sciences study the universe, but they also play an important and undervalued role in students’ formation as persons.

Professor Catherine Crouch, Chair of Physics and Astronomy at Swarthmore College, has made a life of studying physics education. Her research has led her to ponder ways to improve instruction in physics but also into questions about the existential and even spiritual role the natural sciences play in our lives.

Catherine Crouch; Professor of Physics, Swarthmore College

Catherine Hirshfeld Crouch is a Professor of Physics at Swarthmore College, where she has taught since 2003 and is serving as Department Chair for 2021-2026. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021 for her work in physics education, spanning research, curriculum and pedagogy, and institutional leadership.

Dr. Crouch has extensive expertise in both materials physics and pedagogical best practices for college and university science. She earned her PhD. at Harvard University studying electrical transport in nanofabricated quantum dots, and then remained at Harvard in a dual postdoctoral fellowship in materials physics and physics education with Eric Mazur.

She has published more than thirty peer-reviewed articles in both experimental physics and physics education research and has involved more than thirty Swarthmore undergraduate students in research. She has won five National Science Foundation grants for physics education work as PI or co-PI. She served in the Chair line of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Education for 2019-22 and co-chaired its Committee on Education for 2022.

In 2017, Dr. Crouch co-founded and served as the first faculty director of Swarthmore’s Collaborative STEM Inclusive Excellence initiatives to expand support and resources for students in the sciences during the regular academic year. She led this effort until becoming physics department chair in July 2021. She also taught in the Swarthmore Summer Scholars program during summers 2016 and 2017 for underrepresented and first-generation students in the sciences.