Research
Curriculum Vitae
Physics Education
My present research investigates student understanding in physics. The larger picture is preparing students to meet the technological demands of today's job market as well as helping them to acheived the understanding of physical principles that govern the development of this technology. Students have increasing requirements to past educational goals due to the prevalence of computation and numerics in the science and engineering job market.
There are several aspects of this problem that are particularly interesting to me. These include student assessment, curriculum development and complex problem solving. Presently, we are working to understand how students perform on force and motion problems. In addition, we are performing an analysis of a common electricity and magnetism assessment. We hope that our understanding of this material will further guide curricula and increase student comprehension.
Fluid Dynamics
I started working in Prof. Mike Schatz's microfluidics group in the Summer of 2006. My project included developing a non-destructive and reprogrammable technique for transporting micro-droplets of fluid.
The experiment exploited the slow decay of microdroplets deposited on the surface of an oscillating fluid bath. Droplets are kept from coalescing with the fluid substrate by constantly renewing the thin air layer seperating the fluid bath and droplet. Droplets were transported using the deformation the resulted from fluid pileup due to thermocapillary flow induced by an infrared laser.
Astronomy
My undergraduate research involved calculating the production rates of molecular specis in cometary comas. I spent 2 years reducing hundreds of spectral observations to a few digits. It gave me the linux experience that I enjoy today and helped me to learn about research in general.
Publications
- M. D. Caballero, M. A. Kohlmyer, M. F. Schatz, et. al., Evaluation of a Reform E&M Curriculum: A Multi-institutional Study, 2008 (in preparation)
- M. D. Caballero, A. L. Cohran, E. S. Barker, and J. Gyorgey-Ries, Placing the Deep Impact Mission into Context: Two Decades of Observations of 9P/Tempel 1 from McDonald Observatory, Icarus, 2008 (accepted Sep 08)
Talks
- Bouncers, Walkers and Virtual Drops given at Complex Motion in Fluids Summer School in Humlebæk, Denmark, Aug 2007
- Bouncers, Walkers and Virtual Drops [2.0] given at DFD Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, Nov 2007
Projects :