Ruth Wright Chabay (born 1949) is an American
physics educator known for her work in
educational technology and as the coauthor of the
calculus
Calculus, originally called infinitesimal calculus or "the calculus of infinitesimals", is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithm ...
-based physics textbook ''Matter and Interactions''. She is professor emerita of physics at
North Carolina State University.
Education and career
Chabay earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1970 from the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
, and completed a doctorate in physical chemistry at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
in 1975. Her dissertation was ''The Design and Evaluation of Computer-Based Chemistry Lessons'', and was supervised by Stanley G. Smith.
From 1975 to 1977 she worked with the
PLATO
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
computer-aided instruction system at the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and from 1977 to 1980 she was a researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical Biology in the
National Cancer Institute
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...
. After working as a software developer for four years, she returned to academic research in the psychology department of
Stanford University from 1984 to 1987, and in the Center for Design of Educational Computing and the Center for Innovation in Learning at
Carnegie Mellon University from 1987 to 2002.
She became a professor of physics at North Carolina State University in 2002, and retired to become a professor emerita in 2010.
Textbook
With Bruce A. Sherwood, also of North Carolina State University, Chabay is the author of the two-volume textbook ''Matter & Interactions'' (Wiley, 2002).
Recognition
Chabay was elected as a
Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009 "for contributions to the development of computer-based learning and tutorial systems, visualizations, and curricula that have modernized and improved how students learn physics".
In 2014, the American Association of Physics Teachers gave Chabay and her coauthor Bruce Sherwood the David Halliday and Robert Resnick Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Physics Teaching.
References
External links
Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chabay, Ruth
1949 births
Living people
20th-century American physicists
American women physicists
University of Chicago alumni
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni
North Carolina State University faculty
20th-century American women scientists
21st-century American physicists
21st-century American women scientists
American textbook writers
Women textbook writers
American women academics