Joel Shapiro - professional activities

Directory type information (telephone number, email address, etc.) is available elsewhere.

(My links home page is also available)

I am chair of the Departmental Computer Services Committee, and serve on the Instructional Computing and the Technical Services committees of the department. I am also FAS Computer Liaison for the Department, and I serve as the Director of the Physics Supercomputer Remote Access Center. I have devoted a great deal of effort to improving the Departmental Computing Facilities.

Research Interests

My research in elementary particle physics has been dominated by my work on string theory. The mnost recent research has addressed two major topics. First is the understanding of closed string states (including gravitons) as they appear in an open string theory, emphasizing the off-shell and gauge properties. The second topic is the Green-Schwarz string in a curved superspace background. We showed that symmetries required for the consistency of the superstring impose conditions on the background super-space-time which are equivalent to the supergravity equations of motion. It also gives a new picture of the ``conventional supergravity constraints'', showing that the essential physics of supergravity is just what the string can feel.

Other Interests

More recently I have been focussed on teaching, in particular on applications of technology to teaching of introductory undergraduate physics. With a grant from the Teaching Excellence Center I designed a Student Response System in the Physics Lecture Hall, which has been installed and has now completed 1 1/2 years of extensive use in most of the large introductory courses. I am also writing an introductory graduate text on Classical Mechanics.

I am looking into computer aided tutorials for introductory physics. I also have an interest in incorporating some multimedia approaches to instruction. As an experiment I have generated a display of the Poinsot construction, in the free motion of a rigid body, of the the polhode rolling on the herpolhode.

Revised May 5, 1997