Mark Matlin
Senior Lecturer and Laboratory Coordinator
Mark Matlin received his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in physics from The University of Maryland at College Park. In addition to working briefly in industry (TRW Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp.) he has been a Visiting Professor of Physics at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, and at the University of Pennsylvania and Rowan University. He was on the faculty of physics at Sarah Lawrence College. He also has been a postdoctoral fellow and a visiting assistant professor in the Bioengineering department at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2003 he returned to Bryn Mawr College as a Senior Lecturer and Introductory Laboratory Coordinator. His research interests have spanned a range of fields, including: theoretical general relativity, gas laser dynamics, applications of photorefractive materials, and the application of neuroscience-based models of vision to the development of image analysis and feature recognition algorithms.
Mark is no longer active in research, but has been developing curricular materials on scientific computation -- in the form of Jupyter notebooks using Python -- for use in formal courses and for self-study by students. Those notebooks, together with supplementary material, are freely available on github at https://github.com/BrynMawrCollege/TIDES/ .
Teaching
Mark has taught courses throughout the Bryn Mawr physics curriculum, including: Emily Balch Seminar (course title: Good Science, Bad Science and Nonsense), The Search for Life in the Universe, Introductory Physics I & II, Modern Physics, Special Relativity & Electromagnetism, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, Advanced Quantum Mechanics & Applications, Statistical Mechanics & Thermodynamics, Mathematical Methods of Physics, Particle Physics, General Relativity, Computational Methods in the Physical Sciences; Graduate Classical Mechanics, Graduate Electromagnetism I, Graduate Quantum Mechanics I.