When asked about his career accomplishments, Robert Brown’s answer always centers on one theme: his students.
It’s a fitting response for someone who, over the years, has not only earned the university’s highest faculty honor—Distinguished University Professor—but also the university’s Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and its John S. Diekhoff Award for Graduate Teaching and Mentoring.
For Brown, though, the students haven’t just been important in helping him grow as an instructor—they’ve actually changed his career path.
Throughout his four-decade career at ϳԹ, the Institute Professor in the Department of Physics has become a prolific magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) researcher, launched the physics department’s PhD concentration in imaging and co-authored the leading physics textbook on MRIs (known widely in the field as “The Green Bible,” due to the 900-page book’s green cover).
But without his students, Brown is quick to point out, none of those achievements would have happened.
After working on basic physics research (think Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory) in his first decade at the university, two former students approached Brown for help in modeling MRI.
He had always been keen on helping his students find new approaches to learning, but it was those students who helped steer him down a new path for his career.
“It was the start of the MRI revolution,” he said. “I thought I would just be doing that on the side, but no. That revolution overwhelmed me and I began to work on it regularly.”
Currently, Brown researches industrial-product modeling optimization in an effort to improve industrial products and programming instructions for the associated software.
Given that it was originally former students who approached him about MRI, it’s only fitting that his past students have continued to push the field forward—at last count they hold at least 150 patents—and to help him to expand his knowledge in the area.
Brown has advised as many as two dozen graduate students to pass through the physics department’s PhD program with an MRI concentration. Led by one enterprising past pupil, Brown co-launched Quality Electrodynamics, which develops and manufactures medical equipment electronics, including for MRIs.
“Thinking back now, it’s incredibly wonderful because you teach some students for perhaps just one semester, but you may have contact with them forever after,” Brown said.
One such undergraduate student from 30 years ago has drawn Brown back to collaborate on some of his "Sheldon Cooper" high-energy physics; earlier efforts already have resulted in publications of major successful tests at Illinois' Fermilab and Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider involving hundreds of experimenters.
Even after many years of helping students with their theses, Brown’s own MIT PhD thesis has been rejuvenated through citations to it in recent work on the size of protons.
Now, Brown is focused on ensuring all students—even those beyond ϳԹ—are successful in physics, just as his students pushed him forward in the field.
Years ago, he was shocked by how much students forgot from one semester to another—not to mention what they had learned early in their education. This presented a major problem for students planning to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). He knew he needed to do something, so he created a set of physics flashcards.
Those flashcards help establish a point of reference for students when taking the GRE, so that remembering basic concepts and formulas doesn’t eat up their precious time when taking the exam.
“When [students] study these flashcards, lots of testimonials tell us this has prepared them for practically all the questions,” he said.
He has had more than 2,000 sets printed up for students at ϳԹ—and all over the world. The American Physical Society has given away the flashcards as door prizes at conferences for three years running. Another thousand students have used a web app version created by a physics colleague this past year. And the next step is making a flashcard smartphone app to meet the learning needs of all students.
For Brown, helping students reach a moment of clarity while working on challenging problems—watching the “light blub come on”—is the best part of teaching.
“That’s a real thrill,” Brown said.
Read on to see Brown’s answers to this week’s questions.
5 questions with… professor, MRI entrepreneur Robert Brown
5QUESTIONS |
December 4, 2015
STORY BY: EDITORIAL STAFF
STORY BY: EDITORIAL STAFF