The Complex Intersection of Biology and Physics

The 2014 Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education will focus on the Intersection of Biology and Physics.

The fields of biological physics and the physics education of biology and other health-science students have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. New findings, applications, and technologies in biological and medical physics are having far reaching consequences that affect and influence the science community, the education of future scientists and health-care workers, and the general population. As a result, leaders in Physics Education Research have begun to focus their attention on the specific needs of students in the biological sciences, the different ways physicists and biologists view the nature of science and the interactions of scientists in these disciplines.

This conference is an opportunity for:

• Biophysicists and medical physicists to discuss discoveries, technologies, and experiments that excite students and emphasize the physics content in ways that help physicists use them in their teaching at all levels;
• Teachers of physics to discuss the development of new laboratories and curricula by infusing them with biologically- and medically-related topics;
• Physics education researchers and teachers of physics to reflect on: the type of content that is appropriate and motivational for biology and health-science majors, the types of skills that are important for this population and how these skills differ from engineers and physicists, and the types of resources that exist for teaching at the interface of physics and biology (e.g. textbooks, labs, assessment tools, etc.).