Eric L. N. Jensen

Astronomy Research and Teaching

  [HK Tau ALMA data] [HK Tau artists conception]
  HK Tau velocity data from ALMA (Jensen & Akeson 2014, Nature) HK Tau, artist's conception (©2014 Robert Hurt)

I'm a Professor of Astronomy in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Swarthmore College. I also teach about climate change in Swarthmore's Environmental Studies program. I am currently chair of Swarthmore's Natural Science & Engineering Division, and former Director of the Frank Aydelotte Foundation for the Advancement of the Liberal Arts.

My research interest, broadly speaking, is understanding extrasolar planets, planets that orbit other stars. I'm also interested in astrobiology, the study of the origin and distribution of life in the cosmos. This page gives a short introduction to what I do.

Research

Outreach

Teaching

I now do all of my grading / student feedback with a paperless workflow, using an iPad; here is a screencast explaining how that works. (It is based on using Notability and Moodle, but the basic approach should work for other learning management systems, too.)

Increasingly, I've been using Moodle as the course web page for courses I'm teaching. One downside of that is the difficulty of linking to those courses so that people other than the students can see what I'm doing. Below are listings of courses I regularly teach; if you are an educator, please don't hesitate to email me and I'd be happy to share course materials from any of these.


Comments or suggestions to Eric Jensen, e-mail address


Last modified Oct. 2022