Howard Richards Email & Phone Number

Edmond, Oklahoma, United States

Huntington, West Virginia

Wrote successful $343,470 NSF grant application for a Research Experience for Undergraduates to teach scientific computing during the summers of 2010-2012. Assembled team of faculty from Physics, Math, and Chemistry departments to mentor students. Administered the program. Directly mentored 9 of the 36 student participants.Directed the research of two students to successful completion of capstone projects (in computational physics) required for graduation.Negotiated cooperation between departments of Physics and Medical Imaging; authored two new curricula, one in Physics and one in Medical Imaging, so that students can pursue both simultaneously.

Commerce, Texas

Wrote successful grant application for $21,181 Cottrell College Science Award. Administered the program. Mentored multiple students in scientific computing. Directed the research of one graduate student and one undergraduate student to successful completion of a master’s thesis and a capstone project, respectively. (A few years later, the former undergraduate asked me to be his best man at his wedding.)

College Park, Maryland, United States

My lesson from this postdoc was to beware a kind of thinking that is somewhat analogous to numerology, but which can lurk in the instincts of even very experienced researchers.Let me give an example. In Statistics, it is often important to look at the distribution of the sum or average of a sample of a large number of independent, identically distributed random variables; to be concrete, suppose we monitor the average height of men enrolling in the US Army on a month-by-month basis between 2005 and 2015. Due to the Central Limit Theorem, a histogram of these averages should be expected to approximate the normal (or Gaussian) distribution.In Physics, one of the first and most important problems in quantum mechanics is finding the ground state of the one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillator. Both the wave function and the probability of finding the particle at any given point are given by normal distributions. It can be very tempting to think there must be a "profound" connection between these two facts. One might even suspect it has some connection with Feynman's "Sum over Histories". This, however, is not actually a profitable line of inquiry, because there is no clear connection between the two problems. Almost all one-dimensional quantum problems have no relation to stable distributions in statistics.

Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

My lessons from this postdoc included the following.1. Make sure you thoroughly understand the simplest cases of a problem before trying to tackle more complicated cases.2. Make sure you check whether the problem has already been solved.My project was to simulate a polymer melt in which all the (idealized) polymers are identical except in mass, and to calculate the structure factor from these simulations. I suggested that we start by simulating a monomer fluid first, which in fact we did, but we still had problems. After several months of frustration, we realized that the correct analytical solution had been published in the book Atomic Dynamics in Liquids by March and Tosi.

Tokyo, Japan

One of the most important lessons I learned during this postdoc was the importance of documentation in computer programs. I had the unpleasant experience of attempting to reuse code I had written a few years previously only to find I did not recognize exactly what I had been doing; I also had the experience of writing a tricky bit of code, going for lunch, and finding I did not understand what I had just written and was convinced it was wrong, only to find after I had started over and spent a few more hours on it that what I had done before lunch was right. Yes, I strive to use well-named functions and variables (and classes, etc.), but I find that additional documentation, whether internal or external, is often essential.I also learned that I can, in fact, formulate good (interesting, useful, and feasible) research problems on my own.

Master Of Science (Ms), Software Engineering, 3.91

Ph.D., Physics, 3.82

Activities and Societies: Thesis Title: "Magnetization Switching in Single-Domain Ferromagnets: Statistical-Mechanical Analysis.

B.S., Applied Math And Physics, 3.92

Activities and Societies: • Presidential Scholarship • Computer-Based Honors Fellowship • National Merit Scholarship • Alpha Lambda Delta.