Q&A with Marty Baylor featured in Physics Today
Baylor is professor of physics at Carleton.
Marty Baylor, professor of physics, was featured by Physics Today in a piece titled, “Q&A: Marty Baylor enhances students’ skills and their sense of belonging as physicists.” The teaching framework she has developed makes students feel at home in physics and prepares them for the workforce.
Before Martha-Elizabeth Baylor went to Kenyon College in Ohio, she was planning to study paleontology. When she got there, though, that major wasn’t an option. “I identify as first generation, and I didn’t know anything about college,” she says. During high school, she had done an internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center—not, she says, because she was interested in the program but because “my mom was like, ‘It’s a paid summer opportunity, you are going to do this.’” When Baylor had to pick a new major, she turned to physics.
After she graduated in 1998, Baylor spent a few years teaching middle and high school physics and working at NASA Goddard. She then went on to earn a physics PhD in 2007 from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Now a physics professor at Carleton College in Minnesota, Baylor teaches and does research on optical signal processing and photopolymers. Over the past few years, she has developed what she calls the Practicing Professionalism Framework, through which she weaves skills and confidence-building into her courses to benefit students in their working lives. One aim is to change students’ perceptions so that they see physics as a cooperative, communal space where people have multiple interests. The approach, she says, can be adapted to different curricula and teaching styles.