Meet Randall

Physics seems to have been ingrained in me since elementary school. In sixth grade, I was puzzled about the relationship between electric currents and light and I did a science fair project with a classmate on solar concentrators for cooking. I was then also able to take formal physics courses earlier than normal when I attended a school in London, England during my early teenage years. This was in the 1960s so I was aware of solar panels on satellites but had little knowledge of how they worked. Growing up with the space program (I was born two years before Sputnik) certainly was a major factor in my pursuit of physics and it was a dream come true to work for Taylor Wang at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. I had many other superb mentors including undergraduate advisor Robbie Vogt at Caltech, PhD advisor Tom Greytak at MIT, and postdoc advisor Harry Swinney at UT Austin. All of them instilled in me a keen desire to teach physics and to support undergraduate research in my fields of nonlinear dynamics and fluid mechanics.