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

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{{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