Heather Lewandowski awarded APS Advanced Lab Instruction Prize

Submitted by cakl1977 on Tue, 10/23/2018 - 11:42 am

JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski.

Image Credit
Steven Burrows / JILA

The American Physical Society announced JILA Fellow Heather Lewandowski as the 2019 recipient of the F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction.

Lewandowski was recognized for her systemic and scholarly transformation of advanced laboratories in physics, her building of leading assessment tools of laboratories, and for her national service advancing the laboratory educational community

The F. Reichert  and Barabara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction was established in 2012 to recognize and honor outstanding achievement in teaching, sustaining and enhancing advanced undergraduate laboratory courses at U.S. institutions. Awardees must have instructed laboratory classes with enable students to experience a broad selection of experiments in the various subfields of physics, and their instruction must have clear impacts on students and their subsequent careers in physics or applied physics.

Lewandowski has long been an advocate for, and enabler of, improved physics education. In addition to her research on cold molecules, Lewandowski researchers the effectiveness of laboratory instruction. This research has been published in numerous journals, such as Physics Review Physics Education Research and the American Journal of Physics, and her advocacy for advanced lab classes was recently shared on the back page of APS News.

Upon learning of her award, Lewandowski quickly repositioned recognition to her team. “This award recognizes the efforts of a large team of postdoc researchers over the last seven years,” said Lewandowski.

This annual award consists of $5,000 plus travel expenses to attend an APS meeting at which the award will be presented and the honoree will be invited to present a lecture.

Principal Investigators