The ‘gadget’ on the test tower at the Trinity site.	US and Soviet tanks, ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, Berlin.	Marshall Plan poster.

 

Research and Teaching

My research is centered on the history of two iconic domains of state-driven innovation in the cold war, the nuclear and space, extended to include the role of major Foundations as vectors of American interests abroad.  My teaching is mostly at the graduate level, where I also advise three to five students on an ongoing basis.  My contact with undergraduates is mostly at Georgia Tech’s Summer Study Abroad programs in Oxford, where we are lodged in Worcester College, and in Metz (France) where GATech has its own satellite campus.

My undergraduate teaching is evaluated online by a Course Instructor Opinion Survey.  I won the Class of 1934 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award  in 2012, in 2013 and again in 2017 .   My score on the synthetic question ‘Considering everything, the instructor was an effective teacher’, is typically from 4.80 to 5 on a scale of 0 to 5.  I have been the Charles Lindbergh Professor at the National Air and Space Museum, a Davis Fellow at Princeton University (History),  the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor at Caltech (Humanities and Social Sciences) and Resident Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC in Vancouver, Canada. . I won the GATech Distinguished Facuty Research Award in 2008.