Jeremy Wachter

My job is to encourage a physics way of thinking and to show my students how physics connects to their goals. I pursue the teacher-scholar model, developing my pedagogy alongside my research activities, and modify my courses in response to student needs and interests as well as recommendations from educational research. My classrooms make frequent use of active learning and student-directed inquiry, and I incorporate formative feedback and project-based assessment whenever possible. I've done work in physics education on how different modeling approaches affect graduate student learning as well as applying the philosophy of labor-based contract grading to the physics classroom.

I do research in early-universe cosmology and gravitational waves. Much of my work is on cosmic strings, which are long, thin objects formed by the rapidly-cooling primordial universe. The motion of these strings causes ripples in space-time, gravitational waves, which are a promising means of detecting strings. This work has led me to join LISA, an international collaboration working on a satellite-based experiment set to fly in the 2030s, and NANOGrav, a collection of scientists at over 70 different institutions working on precision measurements and analyses of rapidly-spinning stars called pulsars. The theoretical nature of my research makes heavy use of computational resources, and so I'm also interested in developing new codes and exploring more efficient calculation methods.