During my career I have done significant classroom teaching, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In large-enrollment and sophomore-level undergraduate classes, I have worked to bring cutting edge ideas from cosmology into the curriculum in order to provide students with the kinds of experiences that they should receive in a research university. In my graduate classes, I have taught classes on Mathematical Methods, on General Relativity and Cosmology, and on Particle Cosmology, striving to be as innovative as possible with the material, often introducing topics that did not exist the previous year..
Outside the classroom, I have worked extensively to bring science to communities beyond the university. I was involved in these efforts to a modest degree as a postdoc, mentoring three high school girls for the Siemens Science competition, and contributing to a successful “ask an astrophysicist” program. However, as a faculty member I was able to become much more serious about my efforts.
During my time at Syracuse University I initiated a Saturday Morning Physics lecture series, persuading a roster of my colleagues to deliver a sequence of lectures on cutting edge topics. These were advertised to the public, and reliably attracted 50-100 people, including children who had asked their parents to bring them along. In the same period, I had become aware of a movement, predominantly in Europe at the time, to present science to people in cafés and bars – Café Scientifique (http://cafescientifique.org). I put together a small team of four scientists from different disciplines to start one of these efforts. We raised modest amounts of money from our departments, and ultimately from the school, and talked downtown restaurants into giving us space in return for guaranteed customers on otherwise quiet nights. These were highly popular events, featuring speakers from widely different parts of science, and coupled with Saturday Morning Physics were the only regular sources of public science programming in the city at the time.
I was also part of an NSF-funded collaboration between scientists and the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology (MoST). I played a central role in the proposal, bringing on board collaborators from the design school and local high-school teachers alongside the existing staff from the museum, The resulting exhibit – Cosmic Connections – was a successful addition to the museum, and it was particularly gratifying to be able to visit the museum at any random time and see parents taking their children around the exhibit.
Simultaneous with some of these efforts, I became aware of the potential of blogs to reach wide audiences of scientifically hungry people. Inspired by the efforts of some friends in this area, I launched Orange Quark, a blog in which I discussed, among other things, fascinating new ideas in science, and sometimes talked about my own research. The blog began to have a reasonable following, and also exposed me to a broader community of science bloggers, some of whom were in similar research areas to me. These interactions were extremely stimulating and after four months of blogging alone, I joined forces with five other physicists and astronomers to launch a group blog – Cosmic Variance. As a group we were able to have a much stronger blog presence and provide consistent and frequent content focusing on modern physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, at a level accessible to the interested non-scientist, but also allowing our topics of discussion to range widely, including science and religion, science journalism, higher education, and politics. Cosmic Variance rapidly became more popular than I’d ever anticipated, was acquired by Discover Magazine, and for a while was one of the most popular science blogs in the world.
At Penn, I have continued to be involved in public science education in a number of different ways. First, as co-Director of the Center for Particle Cosmology, I have been partly responsible for our public programming. We have raised private funds (from Elon Musk) to support a public lecture, and I personally serve regularly as a public lecturer at clubs, museums, and science cafes in Philadelphia and its suburbs. I participate in public panel discussions as part of the Center, and I deliver annual lectures to high-school students as part of our department’s outreach activities. Furthermore, I have appeared occasionally on radio programs in Philadelphia and beyond to discuss breaking scientific news.
I am immensely proud of this body of work to bring science to people who do not typically meet scientists or have first-hand access to their work. There is no way to know for sure, but it is my hope that children and adults from backgrounds like my own benefitted from all of these efforts, and had opportunities that were not around when I was a science-hungry child.
Mark Trodden 