Edward Wolf

Link to CV URL:

• http://www.poly.edu/user/ewolf

Social Media links, i.e., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

• http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?fname=Ed&lname=Wolf&pplSearchOrigin=SEO_SN&trk=SEO_SN&csrfToken=guest_token&domainCountryName=

Interesting links related to your field you’d like to share

• http://www.iop.org/publications/iop/2011/file_48027.pdf

Please provide a brief description of your teaching philosophy

I think that students learn best by participating in a class activity. In my courses for upper level undergrad and lower level grad students I require each student to do literature research and formulate a presentation on it for the class, sometimes as a member of a team interested in the same subject. Students can learn a lot from each other in a group situation where they jointly have to solve a problem. Sitting and listening is not an optimum way to learn.

What do you enjoy most about teaching at Poly?

I find the students to be of wide backgrounds and often extremely competent and interested in their work.  Some of them are really excellent people, brilliant, diligent and well- mannered workers with great prospects

Aside from textbooks, what other reading material would you recommend to your students?

In my courses I present rather long lists of recent articles from Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, eg. from which they can pick topics for in-class presentations.

Is there a particular person who has made a significant positive impact on your life?

W. Dale Compton, who was my Postdoc advisor in Dept. of Physics at Univ. of Illinois, helped me realize that doing physics in a group environment could be fun. He  enlisted the help of John Bardeen  to interpret the interesting electron tunneling spectroscopy data I measured.  Dale  later became Director of Research and Vice President of the Ford Motor Company.  The  work that  I did at Illinois  with Dale led to an invitation from Nevill Mott at University of Cambridge to spend a year at Univ. of Cambridge.  Mott  later won a Nobel Prize in physics.

The work with Dale  at Illinois on electron tunneling led to my book on Electron Tunneling Spectroscopy  with Oxford Univ. Press, and, eventually, to the scanning tunneling microscope lab in Nichols Hall  in the early days here at Poly.  Scanning tunneling microscopes are a good introduction to nanotechnology.

Favorite quote: 

As I explained with, my coauthor Manasa  Medikonda, in our 2012  book “Understanding the Nanotechnology Revolution”,  I think a case can be made to broaden  the definition of “nanotechnology” to include  key devices, like the atomic clock and the MRI machine,  whose function depends crucially on things that happen on size scales of nanometers and smaller, down to nuclear sizes. (The MRI machine uses the proton as its basic working part. Knowing how to make a proton into an important device , and actually doing it, might be regarded reasonably as  “nano-technology” . The rules that govern protons kick in at the nano scale.) The narrow definition of nanotechnology as “engineering items with one dimension  in the range 1 to 100 nm” misses a lot of things that I think are best regarded as nanotechnology.  It also helps make a bridge between engineering and science.