For educators. By educators.
A team of four University of Illinois physicists invented i>clicker and then sold the system to Macmillan in 2005. Two of the inventors remain key visionaries and active members of the product development team. Tim Stelzer and Mats Selen are heavily involved in all product decisions and the overall vision of the software and hardware. Tim Stelzer and Mats Selen also continue to travel for i>clicker pedagogical training sessions.
Meet our inventors below! For more information and to see a complete list of their research areas and publications, visit http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/people/.
Research Associate Professor of Physics Timothy Stelzer received his bachelor's degree in physics from St. John's University in 1988, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993. After working as a senior research assistant in the Center for Particle Theory at Durham University (UK), he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral research associate in 1995. In 1998, he was promoted to a visiting assistant research professor and to an assistant research professor in 2000. He is currently a research associate professor with active research programs in both high energy physics and physics education research.
A high-energy particle theorist, Professor Stelzer has concentrated on standard model physics at hadron colliders and is best known for his development of MadGraph and MadEvent programs. These calculation tools are utilized by hundreds of physicists around the world for predicting the outcomes of collisions at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
Fortunate timing allowed Professor Stelzer to participate in the reform of the introductory physics courses at the University of Illinois and the creation of the Physics Education Research group. The curriculum revision utilized the principles of active learning and peer instruction. Professor Stelzer has received many teaching awards and is a regular on the University's "Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students." His most prized recognition is being voted "Lecturer with the best sense of humor." He is currently focusing on developing educational materials that fully exploit the new level of interactivity available in lecture.
Professor of Physics Mats Selen earned a B.S. in physics from the University of Guelph (1982), an M.Sc. in physics from Guelph (1983), and an M.A. in physics from Princeton University in 1985. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1989. He was a research associate at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) at Cornell University from 1989-1993. He joined the Department of Physics at Illinois in 1993 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 1997, and to full professor in 2001.
Professor Selen is an extraordinary teacher, and his decision to accept a university position, rather than to remain a permanent staff researcher at a major particle physics facility, was motivated by his commitment to science education. Since coming to Illinois, he has been a prime mover behind the massive curriculum revision of the calculus-based introductory physics courses (Physics 211-214), and he was the first lecturer in the new sequence. He developed Physics 123, a hands-on physics course taken by about 100 elementary education students each spring. He also started the Physics Van, an award-winning community outreach program that introduces grade school children to the fun and excitement of physics, and is a regular on local morning television as "The Whys Guy."
As an experimental high-energy physicist, Professor Selen has made significant contributions in several research areas including the study of charmed meson production and decay, and the design and construction of high-speed electronics.
Professor of Physics Gary Gladding earned a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Illinois in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in physics in 1971. He has been a member of the physics faculty at Illinois since 1973 and is currently Associate Head for Undergraduate Programs. For more than twenty-five years he focused his research in experimental high energy physics, doing experiments at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, Fermilab, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory at Cornell. Most of his work has involved studies of heavy quarks.
For the past ten years, though, Professor Gladding has changed his research focus to physics education. He led the faculty group responsible for the success of the massive curriculum revision that has transformed the introductory physics curriculum at Illinois. This effort has involved more than 50 faculty and improved physics instruction for more than 25,000 science and engineering undergraduate students. He has also been the primary developer of a program to prepare at-risk students for success in introductory physics. He now leads the physics education research program at Illinois. He has won numerous awards for innovative teaching at Illinois as well as the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award form the American Association of Physics teachers. Most recently, he is working with Tim Stelzer and Mats Selen to develop multimedia learning modules that support the transformation of introductory lectures to interactive experiences that make extensive use of i>clickers.
Benny Brown earned his bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He worked for a number of years as both an electrical and a software engineer at Motorola in the suburbs of Chicago. While at Motorola, Benny's work included such varied tasks as supporting factory production, design and analysis of mixed-signal circuitry for diesel engine controllers, charging circuitry optimization and software development for cellular phones.
After deciding to leave Motorola to pursue his interest in physics, Benny attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his master's degree. He studied stochastic cellular automata under Professor Alfred Hubler at the Center for Complex Systems Research. His background in electrical engineering has allowed him to continue his research under Professor James Crutchfield at the Complexity Sciences Center at the University of California, Davis. His work involves building a "swarm" of mobile robots for investigating novel machine learning concepts based on information theoretic measures.
At UIUC, Benny was regularly cited in the University's "Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students" and in 2002 was given the physics department's Scott Anderson Award, recognizing outstanding physics teaching assistants. As a member of the i>clicker team, Benny helped to create the first prototypes of the i>clicker by designing circuitry, developing the communications protocol and writing firmware for both the clicker and the base.