Science for People

I went to graduate school with a great love for physics and a sense of wonder at how our auditory system works to help us understand the world around us. I chose to stay in academia because I wanted the freedom to work on research topics that interested me, without having to kowtow to management. Often this took me in directions which were decidedly non-commercial (understanding the acoustics of Bach’s church or trying to predict the effects of noise transmission during the pandemic). Sometimes these forays into other fields also led back to more basic questions in physics, as new questions necessitate new methods to answer them.

However, having received tenure at American University, I’ve realized that I don’t have to spend all my time on narrow academic questions, and in fact it is refreshing and uplifting to spend time applying what we know about acoustics, noise, and sound perception to real-world problems faced by ordinary people. Just as interdisciplinary work can lead back to new questions for science to answer, so can applied work cross-fertilize between the scientific rigor of the university with the quick-moving solutions of the free market. I will always be an academic first, but I hope here to use science to help people understand sound better and help their world sound better too.