Faculty Spotlight
Heather Lewandowski: Professor, Department of Physics; JILA Fellow
Research interests
Lewandowski’s group studies collisions and reactions of simple cold molecules, with the ultimate goal to understand the quantum mechanical processes involved in making and breaking a chemical bond. Her group aims to control the reacting molecules external and internal degrees of freedom in the quantum regime. To accomplish this control, the team slows down a supersonically cooled molecular beam using time-varying inhomogeneous electric fields (Stark deceleration). The cold (~100 mK) molecules are then loaded into an electrostatic trap to allow for interactions to be studied for several seconds.
Education and experience
Lewandowski received her BS in physics from Michigan Technological University in 1997 and a PhD in physics from the University of Colorado in 2002, working in the group of Nobel Laureate Eric Cornell. She started as an assistant professor at CU Boulder in 2005. In addition to her other academic affiliations at CU Boulder, she is an associate chair of physics and the director of the Engineering Physics program.
In 2011, she expanded her research portfolio to include Physics Education Research. Her PER work focuses on student learning in laboratory courses, particularly at the upper-division level.
Quotable and notable
Lewandowski was named a 2020 Career Mentoring Fellow by the American Physical Society (APS) and won the Homer L. Dodge Citation for Distinguished Service from the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2019. She also won the APS’s Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction in 2019.
She was named an APS fellow in 2018 and won a Traditional Fulbright Scholarship that year. Additionally, she won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award from the National Science Foundation in 2008. She won a Sloan Research Fellowship in physics from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2007.
In an article published in the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research this fall, Lewandowski and two colleagues explored higher education role in preparing the quantum-revolution workforce.
Drawing from 21 interviews with U.S. companies, she and her fellow researchers suggest that students graduating with a bachelor’s in physics or engineering can be insufficiently prepared to work in the quantum field. Physics majors generally have little experience building electrical or quantum devices, while engineering majors often have little exposure to quantum mechanics, Lewandowski told Physics, which profiled the work.
“Improving our undergraduate instruction is really important,” she told the publication. “We need more authentic laboratory experiences and refocused introductory quantum-information courses that have no physics prerequisites.”
Heather Lewandowski