Professor Gordon J. Aubrecht, II, who teaches physics at The Ohio State University at Marion recently attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego. At that meeting, Aubrecht was presented with the rosette recognizing him as a Fellow of the Association by the AAAS president, Peter Agre.
Aubrecht was also named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. In both cases, he was the first fellow named from an Ohio State regional campus. The citation for his AAAS Fellowship from the Physics Section reads: For distinguished contributions in theoretical particle physics, for physics education research, for making contemporary physics more accessible to students and teachers and for contributions to standards.
Aubrecht’s graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University, and did his doctoral work in theoretical particle physics at Princeton University. While at Princeton, he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and an NDEA Graduate Fellow. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1979-80.
Aubrecht contributed to particle physics for many years, working on Y photoproduction and calculating the decay rate for t ® h p for the first time in the literature (it turned out close to the experimental result found over 15 years later). Aubrecht helped organize and run the AAPT Conference on the Teaching of Modern Physics: Particle Physics at Fermilab in 1986. He has served on the steering committees of national and international conferences. He is a founding member of the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP), and served many years as secretary and as chair. CPEP has produced spectacular classroom charts for particle physics, plasma physics, nuclear science, and cosmology.
Aubrecht has contributed to physics education research over most of his career. He is interested in classroom assessment, exposure of students to contemporary physics concepts, and what introductory students know about quantum mechanics. He is Executive Secretary of the InterAmerican Council on Physics Education, which runs triennial meetings for physics educators in the western hemisphere and is on the steering committee of the Latin American Physics Education Network.
Aubrecht is secretary of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers Standards Coordinating Committee 14 (Quantities and Units), serves on a Technical Advisory Group for the International Standards Organization and is coauthor of numerous standards.
Aubrecht is author of the college-level physics textbook, Energy (3rd ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2006) as well as about a dozen other books. He is coauthor of The Charm of Strange Quarks, (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2000) and Doing physics with spreadsheets (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000).
Aubrecht received the American Association of Physics Teachers’s (AAPT) Distinguished Service Citation in 1996. He received the John B. Hart Award for Distinguished Service to the Southern Ohio Section/AAPT in October, 2002, its highest award. Aubrecht received the Howard N. Maxwell Award for Distinguished Service from the Ohio Section of the American Physical Society in 2004, awarded occasionally by the Section for meritorious service. He received the Association of University Regional Campuses of Ohio Distinguished Service Award in 2004. The Ohio State Chapter of the American Association of University Professors presented him its Loius Nemzer Award also in 2004 for “defense of academic freedom against all challenges.”
Aubrecht was on the Citizens Advisory Council (CAC) of the Utility Radiological Safety Board of Ohio from 1994 to 2000, and was CAC scribe from 1997 to 2000.
Aubrecht has been involved in university governance for over thirty years. He served as University Senator from the Marion Campus several times. He serves currently as OSU Senate Scribe. Aubrecht was given the award for Distinguished Faculty Service by Ohio State in 2008.
Aubrecht was one of a large contingent of Ohio State faculty members who were named AAAS Fellows this year, including OSU President E. Gordon Gee. The total number of Ohio State AAAS Fellows is now 177.
About Marion Online News
