2020 Winner, Alice Gasparini
Geneva Secondary School
Switzerland

The 2020 Contemporary Physics Education Project Award for Excellence in Teaching Contemporary Physics is being awarded to Dr. Alice Gasparini. Dr. Gasparini began her studies in Parma (Italy) and continued her training in physics and mathematics at the University of Geneva where in 2006 she obtained her Ph.D in theoretical physics. It was during her post-doctoral work at the University of California Santa Barbara that she began to engage in teaching, which motivated her to share her passion for physics, particularly contemporary physics subjects, with young people. Dr. Gasparini began a second thesis in physics education in 2017, aiming to study the impact of the use of smartphones and tablets as measuring instruments in physics classes.

Since 2008 Dr. Gasparini has been teaching mathematics and physics at Geneva secondary school in Switzerland, and is a scientific collaborator at the University of Geneva. She has developed activities, a course, and a book on the subjects of general relativity and cosmology, exclusively based on high school mathematics and physics. This has allowed her to share her excitement for these subjects with her pupils and with teachers from different countries. She collaborates with her colleagues at the university and in high schools on several initiatives for the dissemination of teaching materials, course experiences, and the development of new activities on contemporary physics topics. Her colleagues describe her as having a sincere, indefatigable desire for the students to learn, and as being passionately determined to provide an intellectually stimulating environment for them.

Her continuing efforts to introduce her students as well as other teachers to contemporary physics topics, particularly cosmology, has made Dr. Alice Gasparini the 2020 recipient of the Contemporary Physics Education Project’s Excellence in Teaching Award.