Phil Fraundorf, currently a faculty member in physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis and an adjunct at Washington University in St. Louis, has enjoyed being a regional scientific observer of extraterrestrial and electronic materials, as well as a wide diversity of other materials for nanoscopic investigation that have "walked in the door.” He has also worked at offering nanoscale exploration tools for industry and university researchers around the Midwest, developing mathematical techniques for exploration of solids on the atomic scale, and observations of correlation-based complexity on multiple scales of time and space that might bridge rather than divide the gap between cultures. Specific interests include dust from around our star and others, oxygen in and on gigascale integrated-circuit silicon, mathematical detective work on direct and reciprocal-space images, Bayesian approaches to the structure of correlation-based complexity and its role in the natural history of invention, and metric-based approaches to motion at any speed.
The first three of these interests have helped in developing regional nano-microscopy resources at Washington University, Monsanto, UMSL, and, most recently, across Missouri with the help from the Governor's Research Alliance. An atomic-resolution imaging facility that Phil helped design from the ground up at UMSL has provided collaborators across the state with their only regional access to atomic-resolution (i.e. sub-2-Angstrom point-to-point) imaging for over a decade. Emergent content courses and web resources under development include a popular “how things work” course, and it brings in on the order of a million requests per year for educational links in the university web space.
Education
Department of Physics, PhD, Washington University
Department of Physics, MS, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
