News 2025
A Fond Farewell to Alejandro Garcia
January 24th -- Hundreds of students, faculty members, and friends met up at WSQ 109 to wish Professor Alejandro Garcia farewell as he transitions into retirement, and to watch him perform some of the greatest hits of the many demos he has worked with and helped to develop over the years. He will be sorely missed! The event was hosted by Professor David Chai of the Animation & Illustration Design Program, where Garcia has built up strong connections over the years.
Cosmic Dust Shells in Action
January 23rd -- Associate Professor Thomas Madura and collaborators have a new paper out using the James Webb Space Telescope to identify two stars responsible for generating carbon-rich dust a mere 5,000 light-years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. As the massive stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing past one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce carbon-rich dust. For a few months every eight years, the stars form a new shell of dust that expands outward — and may eventually go on to become part of stars that form elsewhere in our galaxy. The findings have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and the Space Telescope Science Institute has also written up a popular summary.
New Insights into the Benefits of Reformed Physics Courses
January 23rd -- Professor Cassandra Paul and her colleague David Webb at UC Davis
have a paper out uncovering new benefits of implementing "reformed" physics courses
(i.e., courses incorporating high levels of active learning strategies in their design
structure) at the introductory college level. The paper is entitled "Examining equity
and graduation rates at two institutions using a course deficit model and the collaborative
learning through active sense-making in physics curriculum," and it was published
on January 23rd in the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research.
As universities are currently struggling with how to retain students, decrease equity gaps, and increase graduation rates in a post-pandemic world, Paul and Webb compare the original success of a radically reformed introductory physics course with an implementation at a second institution. They find that students who take this reformed course at both institutions are 1) less likely to drop, 2) less likely to fail, and 3) do as well in later coursework when compared to students who took the original courses. The above items are found to be independently true for historically marginalized students. Furthermore, they find that 4) marginalized students who take this course 6% are more likely to graduate from a STEM field, eliminating the graduation equity gap at one institution. Building from their prior work, they continue to claim that demographic group differences are, perhaps, better understood as a problem with the system (i.e., through the lens of a "course deficit model") rather than as a problem with the demographic groups. Using this approach can be useful when determining how to eliminate student achievement gaps. Paul and Webb argue that higher education has the tools needed to significantly increase equity, and improve student success and retention in STEM. This requires an investment in the reform of large introductory STEM courses.
Ehsan Khatami Wins $628k from the NSF for High-Performance Computing
January 22nd -- Professor Ehsan Khatami has been awarded a $628k research infrastructure
grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the installation of an updated
high-performance computing cluster here on campus. The grant, entitled "Research Infrastructure:
CC* Compute-Campus: A campus-wide computing resource for research and teaching at
San Jose State University," was written by Khatami in collaboration with Bob Lim (the
SJSU Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer) and Feruza
Amirkulova (an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering). Congratulations,
Ehsan!
