Former UNC Chapel Hill PhD student Kent Price recently attended a meeting of the PICUP (Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics) community, and discovered he was one of five UNC alums among an estimated 60 participants and organizers.
PICUP is an informal organization created by two retired physicists – Norman Chonacky and David Winch – having broad experience in undergraduate education, applied physics research, and engineering development. They have conducted research into the integration of computational physics in undergraduate environments, and recruited to the partnership a collection of physics instructors representative of the national diversity of institutional types and departmental environments, all bound by interest in and commitment to the integration of computation into undergraduate courses as a third method of modeling, investigating, and understanding the physical world.
From left to right: Brandon Lunk (BS 2004, Lecturer at Texas State University), Josh Fuchs (PhD 2017, Assistant Professor at Texas Lutheran University), Floyd James (PhD 1983, Associate Professor at NCA&T), Kent Price (PhD 1998, Associate Professor at Morehead State University in Kentucky), and Maggie Brewer Sherer (Professor and Chair at William Jewell College).