User:Gwinters

Gillian in 2006

Gillian Winters teaches Physics at Smithtown High School.

Before teaching, Gillian was the lead Physicist for a company that designed and made x-ray fluorescence instruments used for measuring thin coatings of precious metals on semiconductor devices, among other things. Prior to that, Gillian was lab supervisor for catalyst identification in a chemical company, using interesting techniques such as x-ray diffraction and fluorescence, laser-based particle size analysis, electron microscopy, and atomic emission and absorption spectrometry.

Gillian’s Ph.D. was in condensed matter physics at U of D, and her bachelors and M.Sc. in Physics were at McGill University. She joined the MARIACHI project through Quarknet in July 2005, built a Cloud Chamber for Smithtown HS with QuarkNet2006, participated in the 2007 MARIACHI Summer Workshop, the 2008 MARIACHI Detector Calibration Workshop, the 2008 MARIACHI Summer Workshop, the 2008 QuarkNet workshop, and took the related course Stony Brook University course PHY315/CEB558 in the spring of 2008. It turns out that this cosmic ray stuff is a lot of fun.

In her spare time, Gillian is unofficial chauffeur for her two children, ages 12 and 14. They have various sports activities, school-related activities, social agendas, and the list goes on. They have more extracurricular activities than Gillian does. One could wish that they could drive themselves, but we will get into the whole driving thing plenty soon enough.

Summer Workshops

I've kept blogs of the summer workshops.
Go to my blog to see what we did in the 2008 MARIACHI Summer Workshop. Sam kept a really good blog. This was mostly a workshop for analysis of cosmic rays. There were about 50 people: professors, graduate students, undergrads, high school teachers, and high school students. Fun was had by all, and we even have photographic evidence.

Also go to my QuarkNet blog to see what we did in the 2008 QuarkNet Workshop. This was a group of 15-20 physics teachers, and we built and ran demos and experiments for physics classes. We also had a couple of invited speakers, and built two sets of QuarkNet cosmic ray detectors. I expect to take one of the sets of detectors back to Smithtown High School for some students to take cosmic ray measurements.

Go to my blog to see what we did in the 2007 Summer Workshop, or, even more interesting, see the blogs written by students Patrick, Jie and Jessica.

Also go see the cloud chamber for Smithtown HS, one of several cloud chambers that a bunch of physics teachers built at QuarkNet 2006.

Bill and the Cloud Chamber, 2006