Patricia M. Heller is a retired American scholar of physics education, and an associate professor emerita at the University of Minnesota. [1] She is known for her research on physics instructor attitudes and on cooperative learning, for which she received the Robert A. Millikan award of the American Association of Physics Teachers. [2]
Heller studied physics, with a minor in chemistry, as an undergraduate at the University of Washington. She graduated in 1966, and continued there for a master's degree in 1969. After working for four more years at the University of Washington as a physics instructor, assisting Arnold Arons with a project in elementary school education, she became a doctoral student in science education at the University of Michigan. As a student, she continued to work there as a physics instructor, and in Detroit, Michigan, as an elementary school science teacher. She completed her Ph.D. in 1977. [3]
In 1979, she joined the University of Minnesota as a lecturer in the College of Education. She switched to a lecturer position in the School of Physics and Astronomy in 1982 and then, in 1986, returned to the College of Education as an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. [3] She retired as an associate professor emerita in 2004. [1]
Heller was the 2010 recipient of the Robert A. Millikan award of the American Association of Physics Teachers. [2]
Robert Andrews Millikan was an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.
Melba Newell Phillips was an American physicist and a pioneer science educator. One of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, Phillips completed her PhD in 1933, a time when few women could pursue careers in science. In 1935, Oppenheimer and Phillips published their description of the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, an early contribution to nuclear physics that explained the behavior of accelerated nuclei of radioactive hydrogen atoms. Phillips was also known for her refusal to cooperate with a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee's investigation on internal security during the McCarthy era which led to her dismissal from her professorship at Brooklyn College, where she was a professor of science from 1938 until 1952.
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