By Jamie Oberg

University of Maryland physics professor Peter Shawhan gave the last lecture in this year’s Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Lecture Series on Tuesday.

Recipients of the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award give the lectures every fall semester. The winners are chosen from a pool of nominated full-time tenured professors from any UMD college or program who have been at UMD for at least five years, according to the Office of Faculty Affairs website. 

The lectures have been around for the last 25 years. 

When Shawhan first started working at UMD in 2006, he took note of the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher award winners each year. 

“I was saying to myself, maybe I’ll win that award someday,” he said. “And then eventually, I did.” 

And he did. He won the award this year, along with 5 other professors. Shawhan used his lecture to explain his research detecting gravitational waves, ripples that stretch and pull space in a wave like motion. The waves are created whenever an object with mass moves but can only be detected when objects of a certain size, like black holes, create them.  

He’s won numerous other awards for his work, including the Gruber Prize in Cosmology based at Yale University and cosponsored by the International Astronomical Union. 

Laura Rosenthal, the director for faculty leadership in the Office for Faculty Affairs and a professor in the Department of English, wrote that the lectures allow professors to share their expertise and highlight the range of studies happening on campus. 

“[The] lecture series offers the entire UMD community the opportunity to learn more about the important research taking place on campus,” Rosenthal wrote in an email. 

Rosenthal said lecture attendees usually include faculty colleagues, students, academic leaders, former students, family and friends of the awardee. Shawhan said knowing the audience all had different levels of physics understanding added difficulty to his lecture. 

“It was a bit of a challenge to plan a talk that would be of interest and accessible to everyone there,” he said. 

The challenge was exciting, Shawhan said.

“It’s really an opportunity to highlight members who come from different fields, who study different things, who work in different ways and show the variety of different things that go on at the university,” Shawhan said. 

Over the last two years, topics have included 3D printing human tissues, Russian disinformation affecting American news, Latin American literature and how noise affects children’s learning. 

KerryAnn O’Meara, who gave the before Shawhan’s, spoke about equity and participation in discretionary spaces, or micro-moments where teachers have the opportunity to influence students. O’Meara said she was very grateful for the opportunity to share her research and felt that the award coming from UMD gave it extra meaning. 

“You get various kinds of recognition throughout your career,” the professor of higher education said. “To have this one here at home meant a lot professionally because it’s a recognition from your colleagues.”  

Shawhan said the lectures are important because they reflect the campus as a whole.

“It’s a representation of what the university considers important,” he said. 

Featured image: Peter Shawhan gives a lecture on Dec. 7. Photo by Jamie Oberg.