AAPT’s Vice President for 2004 Is Heller

Last month, Kenneth Heller took office as vice president of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Heller, Morse-Alumni Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, succeeded Richard Peterson (see Physics Today, February 2003, page 72 ) and will become AAPT’s president-elect in 2005, president in 2006, and past president in 2007.

Heller received his BA in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. After spending several years working as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria and in Kenya, he earned his PhD in experimental high-energy physics in 1974 from the University of Washington, Seattle. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Heller joined the University of Minnesota in 1978 as an assistant professor in the school of physics and astronomy. He became a full professor there in 1987 and has served as the school’s associate head since 1998.

Heller’s research interest is high-energy particle physics. He collaborated on the experiment at Fermilab in which the first observations of tau neutrino interactions were made (see Physics Today, October 2000, page 17 ) and is a member of the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. Also a member of the American Physical Society, Heller is active in physics education R&D with an emphasis on developing effective tools to teach problem solving in introductory physics classes.

“Physics is taught from graduate school to elementary school by people with different backgrounds and interests,” says Heller. “The AAPT,” he adds, “provides a venue to articulate the goals of that teaching in light of research results and new applications that continually change our perception of the foundations of physics; education research that provides more effective and efficient ways of teaching; and the changing needs of society.” Heller says he “will seek to forge closer links between the AAPT and the APS.”

In other AAPT election results, Chuck Robertson (University of Washington, Seattle) was reelected to a two-year term as AAPT’s treasurer and Ruth Chabay (North Carolina State University) was elected as the four-year college member-at-large on the AAPT executive board. She will serve a three-year term.