About MIT 8.226

This publication was produced by the MIT 8.226 class under the direction of Professor Janet Conrad and teaching assistants Fangfei Shen and Suzanne Jacobs.

Every day, across forty-three orders of magnitude in distance scales, scientists are making discoveries that affect society. To support sound public policy about the issues which arise from this research, it is essential for physicists to engage in the public debate.

MIT 8.226 explores some of the questions that our present scientific achievements raise, both for our own community and for the public at large. By considering topics as diverse as the climate change and nuclear nonproliferation, this class makes the case that physics is a necessary part of the national discourse.

Janet Conrad

Janet Conrad, a professor of physics at MIT, leads a research group devoted to exploring the nature of the tiny, almost massless neutrino, which is sometimes called the "ghost particle."

Janet received her Bachelor of Science degree from Swarthmore College, her master's from Oxford University, and then, in 1993, her Ph.D. from Harvard. Before moving to a professorship at MIT, she was previously a postdoc, and then professor at Columbia University in New York.

In addition to teaching at MIT, Janet is also involved in the previous MiniBooNE experiment and future MicroBooNE experiment located at Fermilab, as well as Double Chooz, which is based in France. She is also co-spokesperson of the proposed IsoDAR and DAEdALUS experiments.

Janet developed the class MIT 8.226.

Fangfei Shen

Fangfei is a science writer involved in education, and she has written, reported, and fact-checked for Discover, OnEarth, Scientific American, and MATTER. She received a bachelor's in physics and in writing from MIT in 2011 and a master's in science writing from MIT in 2012.

Fangfei has been a teaching assistant in MIT 8.226 since 2010.

Suzanne Jacobs

Suzanne is a master's student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Michigan in 2011. Before moving to Cambridge, she spent a year working as a research assistant in Michigan studying glacier calving.

Suzanne joined the 8.226 team as a teaching assistant this year.