Innovation Lab

The interests of physicists and engineers are intricately connected. The goal of physicists is to model the behavior of natural phenomena. This is based on observations and measurements using equipment, modeling using mathematics and computer simulations, and tests for reproducibility using experimental equipment. The goal of engineers is to design systems and devices for facilitating human activities and enabling new ones. To do so, engineers use physics for controlling nature at a certain level and shape it to respond to our needs. Thanks to physicists and engineers we know how to make a pile of sand perform billions of operations per seconds: the microprocessor.

The innovation lab of the physics department is set to be the crossroad of these two communities and more. We envision that the innovation lab host the development of real-scale research experiments for physics with our partners and collaborators, including the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jefferson Lab and the Naval Research Laboratory. We want students to participate in these projects so that they will be the best equipped for their future careers.

However, we have even bigger ambitions for the innovation lab. We want it to be the place for creativity and for sharing knowledge without any boundaries. If you have an idea, which can benefit society, improve our everyday life or revolutionize physics (or at least contribute to it). Then build a team composed of scientists, artists, managers, economists, lawyers, health providers, educators ... and propose your idea to the innovation lab.

This is open to all members of the university: students, faculty and staff. If you have ideas but not the scientific and technical background to complete your project, then you will have the opportunity to join our evening clubs where people can work together on electronics (Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, FPGA, ...) and programming projects, share and show their ideas and brainstorm. These clubs are open to everybody from the university because knowledge and skills do not only transfer from faculty members to students but also from students to faculty members and from person-to-person across fields, especially so in the case of modern technologies.

We want students and citizens to be aware of the importance of physics in their everyday life. We want them to be informed about how the technologies they use all the time work and to apprehend the benefits and the risks. We developped courses, workshops, and outreach activities in which we explain how physics in our everyday life operates and how devices work. Via a series of tutorials, we provide the building blocks for creating basic electronic circuits, for interfacing them with a micro-controller, for programming a microcontroller, for operating sensors and for analyzing data; you will learn how to create your own home thermostat or a thermal camera, among others. The participants—who are not necessarily physicists and even not scientists—develop small research projects involving physics and electronics. These projects must be related to the participant passions because physics is everywhere. For example, boxers may want to measure the strength of a punch, squash players can measure the impact of the temperature on the bouncing ball, and musicians may want to measure the impact of temperature on the sound emitted by a music instrument. These are only a few ideas proposed by students in a world where imagination is the sole limit.

We are also currently leading several projects for developing equipment for education and outreach, which will serve in our physics curriculum at GW and will also help to disseminate physics in community colleges and high schools both in the United States and abroad, particularly in developing countries.

If you are as enthousiast as we are about the ambition of the Physics Department Innovation Laboratory, please join us. This is a friendly space where beginners and expert work together and share knowledge, so come with no shame. If you have any questions, please contact me.