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Eric Mazur      

Balkanski Professor of Physics, Optical Physics Researcher, Founder of Tech Companies

Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and Area Chair of Applied Physics at Harvard University, Member of the Faculty of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Past President of the Optical Society. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics in the Physics Department at Harvard University. Mazur founded several companies and plays an active role in industry.

Dr. Mazur came to Harvard University in 1982 after obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. In 1984 he joined the faculty and obtained tenure six years later. Dr. Mazur has made important contributions to spectroscopy, light scattering, the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with materials, and nanophotonics. Dr. Mazur holds Honorary Doctorates from the Ecole Polytechnique and the University of Montreal, Universidad Nacional Mayor San Marcos, Lima, Peru, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. He holds Honorary Professorships from Beijing University of Technology, Beijing Normal University, Sichuan University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, and the Institute of Semiconductor Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Eric Mazur has received numerous awards, including the Esther Hoffman Beller award from the Optical Society of America and the Millikan Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers. In 2014 Mazur became the inaugural recipient of the Minerva Prize for Advancements in Higher Education. He is Fellow of the Optical Society, of the American Physical Society, and of the American Association of Physics Teachers. He is a Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands and a Member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. He has held appointments as Visiting Professor or Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Leuven in Belgium, National Taiwan University in Taiwan, Carnegie Mellon University, and Hong Kong University.

Speech Topics

Getting Every Student Ready for Every Class

1-Hour Discussion Sessions Over the past decades there has been a concerted push away from passive lecturing to active engagement in the classroom. A successful implementation of the so-called flipped classroom requires students to come to class prepared, either by reading the textbook or watching a pre-recorded video. A variety approaches have been devised to get students to take responsibility for this information transfer, but none manage to get all students to participate, compromising active-learning in the classroom. I will present a new approach to get every student to prepare for every class using a new social learning platform that uses a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors to get every student ready for every class

Innovating Education to Educate Innovators OR Teaching One-on-One, All at Once: Turning lectures into learning

Educators want to prepare students for the 21st century, yet our educational approaches have evolved little over hundreds of years of academic teaching. I will demonstrate how active engagement stimulates both higher-order thinking and motivation to learn.

Confessions of a converted lecturer

I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly

Educating the Innovators of the 21st Century

Can we teach innovation? Innovation requires whole-brain thinking — right-brain thinking for creativity and imagination, and left-brain thinking for planning and execution. Our current approach to education in science and technology, focuses on the transfer of information, developing mostly right-brain thinking by stressing copying and reproducing existing ideas rather than generating new ones. I will show how shifting the focus in lectures from delivering information to team work and creative thinking greatly improves the learning that takes place in the classroom and promotes independent thinking.

Assessment: The silent killer of learning

Why is it that stellar students sometimes fail in the workplace while dropouts succeed? One reason is that most, if not all, of our current assessment practices are inauthentic. Just as the lecture focuses on the delivery of information to students, so does assessment often focus on having students regurgitate that same information back to the instructor. Consequently, assessment fails to focus on the skills that are relevant in life in the 21st century. Assessment has been called the "hidden curriculum" as it is an important driver of students' study habits. Unless we rethink our approach to assessment, it will be very difficult to produce a meaningful change in education.

News

Education Giant Pearson Continues Digital Push, Acquires Flipped ...
Furthermore, co-founder Brian Lukoff accepted a new position at Pearson, while Gary King and Eric Mazur (both currently professors at Harvard), were offered ...

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