Physics - Faculty & Staff

Nate Tompkins came to the Wabash College Physics Department in September 2017 after completing his Ph.D. and postdoctoral studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Prof. Tompkins is a native of Oregon and completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at Reed College, where he learned to love the small liberal arts college environment. The intense study and close interactions with students at Wabash are exactly the collegiate environment he was looking for in his career as a professor. Prof. Tompkins is an experimental physicist and studies pattern formation, synchronization, and how to make experimental methods more affordable.

In the classroom, Prof. Tompkins shows how the phenomena studied in Physics courses are observable and accessible to everyone. Accessibility includes demonstrations and laboratory exercises that don't require sophisticated equipment to perform, but instead can be performed by almost anyone - almost anywhere. Prof. Tompkins hopes that students will learn that how Physics exists everywhere, including outside of the walls of the classroom.

In the laboratory, Prof. Tompkins is also focused on the accessibility of experimental methods. As a graduate student, Prof. Tompkins was trained in photolithography and was the director of the cleanroom as part of his postdoctoral position, a facility with multimillion dollar equipment. At Wabash, Prof. Tompkins is focused on how to make these experimental methods affordable and feasible to students and researchers, regardless of their academic institution.

Prof. Tompkins is passionate about educating everybody to appreciate the beauty of the physical world around them and in preparing physics students for graduate school or whatever their next career step may be. He serves as a member of the Pre-Engineering committee at Wabash as well as a guest editor for the scientific video-journal, JoVE.