Since 2004 I have been working in the field of Physics Education Research, which is a form of discipline-based scholarship of teaching and learning. I am interested in how students best learn physics, particularly in first-year university courses.

• In 2025 I co-presented with Ania Harlick at the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers Conference on Teaching Physics with a Free Textbook
• In 2024 I gave a talk at the American Association of Physics Teachers Conference entitled Gender and Early Success as Predictors of Student Retention in Physics
• In 2023 I gave a talk at the Canadian Association of Physicists Congress entitled Teaching Physics Before and After 2020
• In 2023 I gave a talk at the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers Conference entitled Assigning and Facilitating Roles in Physics Lab Group Work
• From 2013-17 I collaborated with teaching colleagues in my department on series of four papers investigating first-year teaching methods. We investigated high school preparation (2014), compressed-format summer courses (2015), team-based learning in undergraduate laboratories (2016) and personality types (2017).
• In 2013-14 I co-supervised a Masters student, Rikki Landau, who investigated the effects of breadth courses on student attitudes about science (Landau's Thesis - Publication)
• From 2007-2011 I was one of the leaders on the Physics Practicals revitalization project for laboratories and tutorials in first-year physics. This involved obtaining three internal grants at U of T (worth a total of $1.3 million), visiting comparable institutions, meeting with architects and construction teams, and co-authoring 200 pages of student and instructor guides.
• From 2005-2015 I was involved with a multidisciplinary Education Research group at U of T which investigated team-teaching (2008), personal response system use (2009), and student use of textbooks (2015)

I also have an interest in Astronomy and Astrophysics research. Some examples are:

• In 2021 I collaborated with colleagues at the SETI Institute on simulations of grain transport on Mars (2021)
• In 2000 I completed my PhD thesis entitled The Faint End of the Stellar Luminosity Function, which was a study of the number density of stars in the solar neighbourhood.
• In 1998 I was involved in a project to measure the distance to Geminga, a neutron star and supernova remnant in the constellation Gemini. Geminga can be seen using visible light with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and I attempted to use archival HST data to measure the parallax of Geminga as the Earth orbits the sun, thus inferring its distance.
• In 1996-1997 I designed, built and commissioned the first spectograph used at the Hobby Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas, the Upgraded Fiber Optic Echelle spectrograph (UFOE).
• In 1993 I discovered a star. Gliese 372 was previously thought to be a single star, but using spectra I took at the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill, I discovered that it was in fact a double-lined spectroscopic binary. So the star I discovered was named Gliese 372 B. (1995, 1996)

ORCID iD 0000-0003-1603-0792