Matthew Deady

BIOGRAPHY

I was born in 1953 in the quaint Midwestern hamlet of Chicago, Illinois. I grew up in the suburb of Oak Park, child #4 in a family of eight children. I enjoyed everything about school, but that being the Sputnik era, the nuns insisted that it was my patriotic duty to become a scientist. At an early age I figured out two things: that I was good at math and science, and that I had a knack for explaining it to my classmates. From that point on, I was pretty sure I would become a science teacher of some sort.

In 1971, I headed off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I studied both physics and mathematics, getting degrees in each in 1975. Illinois was a great environment for a self-motivated learner like me because it provided so many opportunities in and out of the classroom. I had some great teachers and a lot of mediocre ones, but I had lots of smart and interested classmates, so we learned from each other. I also worked nights and summers in the Nuclear Physics Laboratory as an accelerator operator for MUSL-1 and MUSL-2, (Microtron Using a Superconducting Linear accelerator) the electron accelerators that were being developed at the lab. It was a great introduction to research, and it honed my ability to make complicated decisions despite severe sleep deprivation, a valuable skill for any experimentalist.

In my senior year, I had decided I wanted to pursue experimental physics, but felt that there was a lot more math that I still wanted to know. So, I stayed at Illinois for a master's degree in math, studying Hilbert Spaces and Lie Groups, both of which have considerable applications in Quantum Mechanics. During those two years, I also got valuable classroom experience teaching a variety of math classes. In 1977, I started physics graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My only complaint about my years there is that I did not get to do any teaching, but I had plenty of other work to keep me busy. Frankly, I struggled to keep up with my grad school classmates (there are a lot of smart people in physics, you know?), but I did OK. I was also doing nuclear physics electron scattering experiments at the MIT-Bates Linear Accelerator Center located 30 miles north of Boston. My own experiments involved nucleon knockout experiments on Calcium-40 and Calcium-48 that told us a lot about how the protons and neutrons are held in the nucleus. And I was such a lab rat that I also joined in on as many other experiments as I could. Of the many researchers I worked with back then, the two I maintain research affiliations with are Blaine Norum, who is now a professor at Virginia, and my advisor Claude Williamson, who is now retired from MIT.

As graduation neared in 1981, I decided to look for a teaching job at a small liberal arts college. I felt that this would be the best environment for me to work in, where I could interact intensively with small groups of students at all levels. To my great fortune, Mount Holyoke College hired me that year. I spent six years there, happily finding that 'college professor' was indeed the right career for me. In 1987, I came to Bard, and immediately knew that I had found my true home. I continue to love what I do and do what I love.

I teach the whole gamut of Physics courses, from Physics 141 (Introduction to Physics) to Physics 403 (Quantum Mechanics) and almost everything in between. Since Bard has small departments (just Burt Brody, Peter Skiff, and me in Physics), we all have to do lots of different things, which we all find very exciting. Besides the mainstream Physics courses, I regularly teach Physics 116 (Acoustics, a.k.a. the Physics of Music) for non-scientists and a course on the conceptual conundrums of Quantum Mechanics (Schrodinger's Cat and All That). In my years here, I have also taught various courses in applied math, computer science, philosophy of science, and regularly teach in Bard's First-Year Seminar program. I find it particularly engaging to team-teach courses, since I learn a great deal from my colleagues and our students benefit from hearing contrasting perspectives of difficult material. Bard is an exciting intellectual environment to be in, and I revel in it.

Teaching has always been my highest priority, but I do have a variety of active interests in the laboratory and in theoretical investigations. My experiments at the MIT-Bates lab have wound down although I collaborate on some other nuclear physics experiments, but mostly I work on small-scale projects with Bard students. The kinds of problems that come out of our senior research projects can be very challenging and I enjoy getting deeply engaged in them. Some recent projects involved conduction in metals, relativistic mechanics, and phase transitions in mixed solutions. Lately, I have been concentrating on musical acoustics, which combines my scientific and musical interests. This has been the focus of much of my work with Bard students during the school year and summers. A few years ago, I even adapted that research into training sessions on the physics of music for student workers at the Brooklyn Children's Museum.

I suppose I should mention a few non-physics things in my life, lest you think I am a total science nerd. I have quite eclectic musical tastes, with an extensive CD and vinyl collection of classical and popular music and go to as many concerts of all genres as I can. I played the horn in band and orchestra throughout grade school and high school, and still bring it out to demonstrate resonance phenomena in class. I must add this footnote: my wife informs me that having been in band just labels me as a different kind of nerd, but since she and I first met as classmates and bandmates in grade school, I am sure that she says that affectionately. I follow many sports, with a long-running passion for the Boston Celtics that goes back to the Bill Russell days (OK, they are in the doldrums now, but they will rise again). I play a variety of intramural sports here at Bard, and for a dozen years I was the captain of the Bard Faculty intramural basketball team. We weren't very good, but since we could threaten to flunk any student who humiliated us too badly, we did win a few games each year. I have lots of very good friends, many of whom were students of mine over the last 30 years. It's hard when your family is in Chicago and other places, and your dearest friends are scattered from coast to coast, but that does mean I have excuses to travel to many places and rarely have to stay in motels. Locally, my Bard science colleagues are my closest friends, and that enriches the learning environment for our students.

I must confess that whatever high profile I have at Bard is chiefly due to my beloved border collie Beta, who is my constant companion. She comes to work and classes with me everyday, providing a welcome distraction to students who a need a little breather when my class gets to be too much. She is easily the most visible canine on campus, so if you visit Bard and a black and white dog insistently drops a tennis ball at your feet, say hello to Beta and throw the ball for her. And say hi to me as well.

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