Because of my position as one of the 4 astronomers in the department, most research I have been doing or taking part in lately has been in service of developing new astronomy curricula for the Physics Department. To inform the curriculum development, Dr. Alice Olmstead, undergraduate Audi Maldonado, and I studied the practice of the Texas State Astronomy Club, and presented this work at the 2019 Physics Research Education Conference [link to paper].
The first class, run initially in Spring 2020 was Observational Astronomy. Dr. Olmstead, Dr. Brianne Gutmann, undergraduate Xander Vasquez, and I created a 2 week unit within the curriculum on the ethics of constructing the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. This unit was modeled after Dr. Olmstead’s ethics unit about the Manhattan Project that she created for Modern Physics. Xander has gone on to present this work at AAPT and PERC conferences.
While I am still doing curriculum development, I am becoming more interested in the ethical questions surrounding being a physicist or astronomer, and want more ways to include ethics in astronomy curricula. Some ideas I would like to explore are the connections between physics/astronomy and the military-industrial complex and the human “colonization” of other worlds.