In my 40 plus years at WPI, I have been involved in teaching, research and service at a variety of levels.  

My research began in condensed matter theory and then moved on to surface physics and quantum optics before I became interested in Bell’s theorem and the foundations of quantum mechanics in the mid-1990s. My work in this area has been concerned with inequality free proofs of Bell’s theorem, investigations of the many ways in which contextuality arises in quantum systems and the applications of entanglement and contextuality in the field of quantum information (see my personal website for more details).  

My teaching has ranged all the way from freshman, through upper-level to graduate courses. I have introduced and taught two new upper-level courses in recent years in response to student demand: PH443X Introduction to Quantum Information and PH351X Introduction to General Relativity. The purpose of the first is to give students a basic grounding in the ideas on which the development of quantum computers is based, and that of the second is to give them a foundation for studying black holes, cosmology and other problems in astrophysics where strong gravitational fields play an important role. It is intended that both these courses will be followed by others that allow students to explore these fields in greater depth.  

The WPI projects program, as embodied in the MQP and IQP, is where teaching and research come most closely together for our students. I have guided dozens of these projects over the years, with quantum information and gravitational waves being the topics explored in recent MQPs and some web-based educational platforms being developed in recent IQPs.  

I taught in the WPI Frontiers program from 1994-2018, a period of almost 25 years. This is a summer program aimed at bright high school students who wish to pursue one of the STEM fields in college. The program still flourishes, with the physics portion of it now being taught by Professors Kafle and Kashuri of our department.