Marietta College is proud to announce that Dr. Joseph Smith, Assistant Professor of Physics, has been awarded the 2024 Doc Brown Young Investigator Award by the Eastern Great Lakes Section (EGLS) of the American Physical Society (APS).
The Doc Brown Young Investigator Award is bestowed annually, usually at the spring meeting, to recognize young faculty for outstanding research. Awardees receive a cash prize and a section commendation.
The award is named in honor of the late Dr. Robert Brown, a respected physicist and educator who made significant contributions to the field. To be eligible, nominees must be Ph.D. lecturers, tenure-track faculty, or tenured faculty who are EGLS APS members working at an institution in the EGLS region, and within six years of their initial appointment. They must also have at least one publication or conference presentation with undergraduate co-authors from their present institution and be nominated by a tenured faculty member in their department.
“It is an honor to receive the Doc Brown Young Investigator Award,” Smith said. “I would like to thank all of the senior capstone, Investigative Studies, and summer ASCENT/Rickey research students I’ve worked with for making this possible.”
Dr. Smith, who joined Marietta College in 2021, is a computational physicist specializing in the simulation of intense laser-matter interactions. He routinely runs simulations utilizing hundreds to thousands of processors at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and top systems nationwide.
His recent projects include the optimization of laser-driven ion acceleration, code development to model laser-induced damage of optical components, and scientific code comparisons. He is also interested in physics education research and the development/evaluation of new instructional tools, such as virtual reality.