I am a native of Birmingham, AL, where I spent my childhood until moving to New York to study dance at the School of American Ballet through Scholarships from the Ford Foundation. I received my Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where I was the 2006 recipient of Samuel B. Barker Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies at the Master’s Level. In my graduate work, performed under an NIH-NIBIB fellowship, I combined theoretical, computational, and experimental techniques towards the development of novel nanomaterials with biomedical and energy applications.
After receiving my Ph.D., I was awarded an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship for work in the Applied Chemicals and Materials Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. My work at NIST focused on the modeling and design of novel materials for plasmonics and photonics. In this work, I used density functional theory methods to derive the optoelectronic properties of 2D materials and developed semi-classical techniques for coupling these properties with the continuum. This approach allowed for efficient mesoscale spectroscopic modeling of metamaterial heterostructures.
Currently, I lead the UAB Distance-Accessible Physics Education Project and have served as project coordinator since 2014. I joined the Department of Physics as an Assistant Professor in 2019. I am Chair of the Technology-Enabled Physics Education Committee. I have also served as Chair of the UAB Physics Curriculum Reform Committee and as a member of the UAB eLAC Enabling Technologies Committee and the QEP Advisory Council. In 2016, I led the development of the first Quality Matters-certified course in the Department of Physics. My education research and teaching interests include the development of self-efficacy and STEM affinity in diverse populations of undergraduate physics students, evidence-based course design, gameful learning strategies, and strategies for delivering individualized instruction at scale. My course development efforts center around the use of computational modeling and simulation to support learning in introductory physics, physical science, and astronomy courses.
