Independent Study

Dean of students leads Wooster seniors around campus for the IS parade carrying the Tootsie Roll flag.

The year-long senior thesis project, or senior Independent Study (I.S.), allows you to experience the beauty and cohesiveness of physics by working on an extended project closely with a faculty advisor. There are few projects, even though narrow in scope, that do not require a breadth of understanding and a dependence on the lecture and laboratory material covered in the major courses. Thus, the senior I.S. is an integral part of your education. It can provide a stimulating climax to your college career while, at the same time, it can be a defining introduction to your profession.

2012 Senior Independent Study Titles

Mohammad Saif Ahmad
Parity-based Measurement and Control of the Spatial Wave Function of Photons
Patrick Butler
Air Drag and External Ballistics
Matt Damon
Progress toward Using an Optical Tweezer to Make Scattering-based Size Measurements
Sarah-Beth Loder
Experimentally and Computationally Determining the Theoretical Aqueous pKa of Three UV-absorbing Benzophenone Derivatives
Alyse Marquinez
The Rocket Science Behind the Political Science: Comparing Space Visions fo the Presidents from 1993-2011 and the Rocket Technology That Helped Characterize Them
Katsuo Maxted
A Cyclic Aero-mechanical Array of One-way Coupled Oscillators
Larry Markley
Perturbing Spacetime
Margaret Raabe
Manipulation of a Photon's Spatial Wave Function
Kemal Ramic
Monte Carlo Simulations of the Clumpy Torus in Active Galactic Nuclei
David Simpson
Analysis of the Correlation Length Amplitude of Nitrobenzene and Dodecane Binary-Fluid Solution

2011 Senior Independent Study Titles

Louisa Catalano
Tighten Up: A Preliminary Study of Knots
Amanda Logue
Understanding the Expansion of a Swellable Silicate
Roger Klein
A Study of the Structure/Function Relationship of NicF in the Bordetella bronchiseptica Nicotinic Acid Degradation Pathway
Alex Saines
// Order and Chaos in the Rotation and Revolution of Two Line Segments
Daniel "Alex" Sullivan
Determining the clumpy nature of the toroidal region: An analysis of X-ray emissions from active galactic nuclei
Ingrid Thvedt
Exploration of the Effects of Cohesive Forces in a Bead Pile

2010 Senior Independent Study Titles

Corwin Atwood-Stone
Accretion Features of AU Mon
Alison Huff
Examining the Characteristics of 17R4 Using Refractive Indices and Dynamic Light Scattering
Heather J. Moore
Continuous Wave Cavity Ringdown Spectroscopy
R. Michael Winters
The Two-Higgs Doublet Model and Sonification: Using Sound to Understand the Origin of Mass (Physics and Music)

2009 Senior Independent Study Titles

Averell Gatton
The Brain vs. Rule 137: Using Spacetime Patterns to Classify the Complexity of Cellular Automata
Matt Gorski
The Consistent Histories Interpretation as a Solution to the Quantum Measurement Problem (Physics and Philosophy)
Evan Heidtmann
A Differential Equations Model of Insulin Spherulite Growth and a Surprising Connection to Algebraic Topology (Physics and Math)
Frank King
/. (Physics and Math)
Mary Elizabeth Mills
Self-Organized Criticality and the Effects of Pseudo-Randomly Dropping Beads onto a Bead Pile
Martha Roseberry
Finicky Freezing: Investigations into the Causes of the Mpemba Effect
Henry Timmers
The Construction of a Continuous Wave Cavity Ringdown Spectrometer
Mike Zappitello
A Fractal Model of Protein Aggregation (Physics and Math)
Mark Zimmerman
Percolative and Conductive Properties of Spherical Mixtures