The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) has awarded its Hans Christian Oersted Medal to Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood, professors emeriti in the Department of Physics. They will receive the medal at a ceremonial session of the AAPT Winter Meeting, where they will also deliver a plenary lecture. 

Chabay and Sherwood are being recognized for their contributions to introductory physics teaching. Over the course of their careers, Chabay and Sherwood have worked on the PLATO system, physics courseware, the cT programming language, the VPython library and WebPython. They also published a textbook, Matters & Interactions, which is on its fifth edition. 

Chabay holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a fellow of both the AAPT and the American Physical Society. In addition to NC State, she has also taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, High Point University and the University of North Texas. 

Sherwood has a Ph.D. in experimental physics from the University of Chicago and is a fellow of the AAPT, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Apart from NC State, he has taught at Caltech, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Carnegie Mellon University. 

The AAPT established the Oersted Medal in 1936 and presents it annually to someone who has had an outstanding, widespread and lasting impact on physics education. The medal is named for Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted, who discovered that electric currents cause a magnetic field while creating a demonstration for his class. Oersted’s discovery played a key role in establishing the theory of electromagnetism. 

This announcement was adapted from the original AAPT press release.