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Eric Myers

 -  Curriculum Vitae

I am a physicist with a wide range of interests. My original training was in theoretical particle physics, but some of my research has overlapped with cosmology, solid state physics (superconductivity) and even the behavior of DNA molecules. I have worked on experiments in particle physics at both Fermilab and CERN. Most recently, I have become interested in the prospect of detecting gravitational waves with the LIGO detectors. In 2004-05 I was part of the team which set up a distributed computing system called Einstein@Home which uses spare computing cycles on your home or office computer to search through LIGO data for evidence of gravitational waves from periodic sources, all while displaying a nifty screensaver.

I am currently working for LIGO on a project called Interactions in Understanding the Universe, which will allow high school teachers and their students to access LIGO environmental data (from seismometers, magnetometers and weather stations) and to use these data for inquiry-based investigations called "e-Labs". This is part of a larger collaboration between physics labs and experimental collbarorations which use Grid computing, with the overall goal of making Grid tools and resources available for education and outreach in addition to their use for research. Right now the project is only in the pilot stage, but I am very excited at the potential of this project to create a scalable tool for inquiry-based science education.

Over the years I've created a number of web pages for computer help.

I am co-author of TeXsis - a collection of TeX macros for physicists.

Talks

• Copies of some of the talks I've given in recent years can be found here

• Hosted elsewhere: The Effects of General Relativity on the Global Positioning System - 15 May 1998
  (Contrary to the page decorations this was not a talk given for Strings 2000. It just uses the same script which I wrote for Strings 2000 to serve the pages, and I can no longer change it.)

Teaching

I have taught physics -- and sometimes math and computing -- at Yale, St. Louis University, Vassar College, the University of Michigan, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and Marist College.

Some of the teaching materials I've prepared over the years which others might find useful include:

• Notes on
  • Metric System Prefixes (and some jokes to go with them)
  • Sig Figs - the rules for computing with 'Significant Figures', and where they come from.
  • an interesting flying illusion
  • and additional hints and quotes on learning physics
• Graduate School and the Physics GRE
• Physics koans and the Origami answer cards
• Fortran and Unix for Physics and Astronomy

BOINC

As a part of my work on creating Einstein@Home I set up a test project using the same BOINC software, called Pirates@Home After serving admirably as a test platform, the project was shut down at the end of June 2005. It was recently brought back when it was deemed useful for further testing and software development for my current project. Please feel free to join the crew.

PGP Keys

Here is my PGP key. You can use this to send me private, encryted e-mail which only I can read, or you can use it to verify that a digitally signed document is signed by me rather than someone else. You can verify that the keys on that page are the correct keys by comparing to this fingerprint:

PGP Key #6E2D2259/RSA: BA39 1D46 5EC3 0D59 C2AC 6FCB F920 4DC8
PGP Key #E519EAC3/DSS: D15B 9A50 B1ED 2947 EC29 B0F6 EA61 FB6E E519 EAC3

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Last modified: Monday, 14-Sep-2009 10:47:37 EDT

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