Research
Science communication skills are considered to be foundational learning objectives for physics students. However, the implementation of dedicated science communication courses has been slow and highly localized. Many physics departments instead incorporate occasional structured communication practice within non-communication courses. Others rely on students absorbing these skills through observation and unstructured practice. Nevertheless, employer accounts highlight a widespread belief that physics graduates are content specialists with noticeable deficiencies in social and communicative skills. My current research focuses on two areas of technical science communication and how we may improve learning outcomes for students looking to develop these skills:
Oral Presentations
Physics curricula commonly incorporate oral presentations into their communications and non-communications courses as final projects. However, students rarely receive deliberate instruction on presentation standards, and those that do often learn from their instructors' anecdotal evidence rather than any communications canon. Further, students must spend substantially more contact hours observing their peers' presentations than practicing live delivery, resulting in course structures that are often forbidden from engaging with the active learning methods known to produce the greatest learning gains. I am taking a research-based perspective to understand what "success" means for oral presentations in science and how we can facilitate student growth along these axes despite highly limited classroom resources. By synthesizing results from a variety of mixed-methods instruments with literature on cognition, multimedia learning, and research-based pedagogy, I assess the many elements of students' dual experiences as presenters and observers that can contribute to or hinder achievement of learning outcomes.
The latest manuscripts on this project are currently in review. Our preliminary results were published in the 2024 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings, which can be found here: Full Text and Publisher's Site. See the Teaching & Mentorship page for details of the course I developed as a part of this research.
Representational Communication
When we hear "science communication," we often think of specific modalities that are regularly framed as such: slideshows, posters, speech, videos, and the innumerable forms of science writing. However, there are other ubiquitous forms of science communication in the classroom that shape the ways in which students develop core skills. One such form is the language of problem-solving; physics instructors use exercises in part to communicate expectations to their students about what they should have learned thus far, and students reciprocate by attempting solutions in part to communicate their current understanding back to their instructors. This language can further be broken down into the various representations—numbers, symbols, text, and visuals, to name a few—seen across physics classrooms and physics education literature. I am working to understand how students develop fluency in translating between representations and what boundaries dictate the difficulties that novices face along their paths to mastery. My current work in this area focuses on interrogating student and instructor approaches to numeric and symbolic problems in introductory physics in pursuit of research-based interventions that could help close the student performance gap between these representations.
The most recent results from this project were presented at the 2026 American Association of Physics Teachers Summer Meeting and 2026 Physics Education Research Conference. The corresponding manuscripts are currently early in preparation. Stay tuned for more to come.
Past Projects
"The essence of science is all about carving a path to the future, one painstaking step at a time!" -Dr. Stone.
See the Publications & Honors page for the history of my painstaking steps. Please do not hesitate to ask about those projects just because they are currently inactive. Academic discussions are paramount to growth, and I would be happy for the chance to revisit those works when the time is right.