The TCNJ Physics Department welcomes Dr. Padma Ganesh as the HHMI Fellow and Visiting Professor of Physics starting this Fall. Dr. Ganesh graduated with a PhD in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India, where she specialized in experimental condensed matter. Later, she worked as a postdoc at India’s National Physical Laboratory studying intercalated carbon fibers and testing metal matrix composites. Dr. Ganesh is exploring the use of graphene as a potential battery material of the future. She is also working on research questions in Physics Education to understand and quantify how students apply their conceptual knowledge to think critically about ideas they encounter in daily life and on social media. Dr. Ganesh is currently teaching General Physics I, where she employs active learning and the use of videos to help teach conceptual understanding. She is also interested in understanding what role, if any, social media plays in reinforcing physicist stereotypes or enabling the exclusion of certain groups in physics.
