Mission Statement

I am a physicist with a passion to explore how research tools and methods developed and used by scientists and engineers can be harnessed as effective learning tools to meet pressing challenges in science, engineering, and technical education. As research and education share the same goal of understanding how the world works and finding solutions to make a better world, there is no reason that a research tool cannot be used to educate people. For example, infrared imaging is a compelling demonstration of how an advanced technology developed by the industry to solve engineering problems can be harnessed as an effective learning technology to solve educational problems; Computational physics provides digital representations of natural phenomena by solving their governing equations numerically.

An online interactive computational fluid dynamics simulation using Energy2D:

News

InfraMation 2012 Keynote Address

On November 6, 2012, I was invited by FLIR Systems to deliver a 45-minutes keynote speech at the Opening Plenary of InfraMation, the world's largest conference on infrared imaging. I presented several original scientific discoveries based on IR imaging, proposed the concept of educational imaging, and suggested business strategies for the education market. The presentation was very well received. I was glad to see that my contributions to applied IR imaging had been recognized by the industry.

USA Science & Engineering Festival

We had an exhibit for our products at the 2012 USA Science and Engineering Festival held at the Washington Convention Center in April 28-29. The image to the right shows our booth setup. On the left is an "Interactive House" hooked up with an IR camera. On the right is a village designed and constructed using Energy3D.

An Infrared Channel of Science

We have launched the Infrared Tube website dedicated to IR imaging experiments for science and engineering education. This website publishes the experiments I have designed to showcase IR visualizations of natural phenomena. Each experiment comes with an illustration of the setup and a short IR video recorded from the experiment. More IR videos will be produced and added to the website as we move along. Teachers and students may use these YouTube videos without purchasing IR cameras (the price for the basic versions of which have come under $900 in the United States, however).

From Virtual to Real

Energy3D is our signature software tool for designing and making scale-model buildings. A cool feature of the program is that students can print out their computer models, cut the pieces out, and then assemble them into physical models. In the future, we hope to integrate this tool with digital fabricators that use additive manufacuring technologies to accelerate the conversion.