Physics: Research Opportunities

Clarkson combines two distinctive strengths that benefit students: personalized teaching and high-powered research. Our professors get to know students as individuals. These faculty members also conduct world-class research in areas of vital importance — and involve undergraduates in the process.

By the time you graduate, two things will distinguish you from peers elsewhere. First, you will have a broad-based, solid knowledge of physics and its applications. Second, you will have plenty of experience in teamwork.

The focal point of our laboratory complex is our Center for Advanced Materials Processing (CAMP), with 70 state-of-the-art research labs. As a physics student, you will have access to these and other laboratory facilities. In your first year, our Physics Team Design laboratory option offers an alternative approach to conventional experiments. As a participant, you investigate and explore the theoretical and experimental sides of a given problem such as predicting the motion of a matchbox car or an electric train. You learn valuable skills such as computerized data acquisition for experimentation and methods for developing a mathematical model to describe a physical situation. You also gain valuable experience working in groups toward a common goal.

In your second year, you'll be encouraged to identify a research project in your area of concentration and continue to work on that project until graduation. Often this research leads to publication in internationally recognized scientific journals.

Faculty, research associates, graduate students, and undergraduates work closely together on leading-edge research in physics. At the Clarkson Institute for Statistical Physics, for example, the techniques of statistical physics are utilized to address problems in a variety of scientific disciplines. The subject of quantum computing is studied at the Center for Quantum Device Technology. Areas of undergraduate research in conjunction with the center include: