Thomas Bauer

Thomas Bauer is Senior Instructor of Laboratory Science in the Wellesley College Physics Department where he has taught since 1986. He received his B.A. degree in Physics at Wabash College (Crawfordsville, IN) and an M.S. also in Physics at the University of Idaho.

Currently Thomas Bauer teaches the labs for the Introductory Physics series (PHYS107) and Modern Physics (PHYS 202). His greatest interest since coming to Wellesley has been improving the laboratory equipment to make greater use of computers, spending considerable time interfacing instruments in the Quantum Mechanics Laboratory to simplify data acquisition and analysis. He believes it is important that students see how computers allow for experiments that were not possible (or extremely tedious) just a few years ago.

Prior to his coming to Wellesley, Thomas Bauer worked for the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in Tucson as an Electronic/Instrument engineer. In 1989-90 he spent his sabbatical with his family back at Steward Observatory's Mirror Lab where he worked on a camera to take pictures of glass melting in the labs 30-ton rotating oven. In his1997-98 sabbatical, he and his family went to Boulder, CO where he worked on a fiber-optic sensor for Hydrazine at a small chemical engineering company.

Thomas Bauer has also written a control software package in Microsoft's Quick Basic that allows one to run a spectrometer, dye laser, lock-in amplifier, and diode laser together in Wellesleyıs Quantum Mechanics Laboratory. The software also can run a Geiger counter that plugs into the serial port of a PC. Recently Thomas Bauer has been working with several students and faculty on constructing several frequency stabilized diode lasers, to aid in their study of hyperfine spectral structure in Rubidium.

Profile last updated: 8/01