Rob Knop : Physics & Astronomy
- BS : Harvey Mudd College, Physics, 1990
- PhD : Caltech, Physics, 1997; thesis title: Spatially Resolved Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of Seyfert Galaxies
- Post-doc : LBNL, Supernova Cosmology Project, 1996-2001
- Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, 2001-2007
- Professor of Physics, Quest University Canada, 2010-Present
I am an Associate Professor of Physics at Westminster College in New Wilmington, PA. See my Classes page for more information about the classes I teach. Soon, I I hope to have links up to my faculty web page, and to pages associated with my research at Westminster.
From 2010-2014, I was a Professor of Physical Science at Quest University Canada, a small liberal arts college in British Columbia. My first faculty position was as an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University. Before that, as a post-doc at LBNL, I was part of one of the two teams that discovered that the expansion of our Universe is accelerating. I was one of the core member of the team doing the work that garnered Saul Perlmutter the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. After Vanderbilt (but before Quest), I took a couple years off from academia, and was a computer engineer at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life.
My resarch interests are constantly evolving. In general, I'm interested in cosmology, galaxy evolution, and interacting and active galaxies. I'm also very interested in numerical and computational astrophysics. Recent projects with students have included building simulation software for "physics 1" type systems (rods, balls, springs, gravity, etc), and morphological classifcation of interacting galaxies imaged with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, comparing morphological features with spectroscopic signatures of star formation.
I'm also a science blogger, with my blog Galactic Interactions.