Katie Morzinski

Many students have passed through the Laboratory for Adaptive Optics (LAO), and I have played a major role in co-mentoring two undergrads.

Andrew Norton (now a grad student at UCSC in EE) was under my and Dr. Don Gavel's supervision in the LAO from Jan. 2007 until Jun. 2008 when he graduated UCSC with his BS in Earth & Planetary Sciences. With me, he studied IDL and did a project on MEMS hysteresis that is reported not only in his senior thesis but also in our 2008 SPIE Photonics West paper. He is now working on the 4096-actuator MEMS mirrors for GPI, high-power laser tests of MEMS, and MEMS fabrication.

Layra Reza, an undergrad from the University of Texas at El Paso and a CfAO summer 2005 intern, was under my and Dr. Scott Severson's supervision in the LAO in the summer of 2005. Layra measured individual voltage curves for each actuator, using those to then flatten the MEMS faster in closed loop. Besides her summer written and oral report, her work contributed to grad researcher Julia's 2005 SPIE summer San Diego paper, 2006 SPIE Photonics West paper, and her Optics Express paper.

I enjoyed working with these and other students. Mentoring is rewarding and also increases my overall research productivity.

The CfAO's Professional Development Program (PDP), now the Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE), has imparted to me many of the skills of a scientist.

The PDP involves theory and practice in teaching science as inquiry. Through PDP activities I have not only improved my teaching and facilitating, but also my research via gaining perspective in planning, implementing, and communicating science.

Furthermore, I have had the opportunity to lead and manage two teams of my peers in PDP projects. This experience was rewarding and gave me experience in preparation for eventual roles as principle investigator as my career progresses.

This is an inquiry lab I designed and taught for the PDP in Claire Max's graduate class "Adaptive Optics and its Applications."

I was Design Team Leader for this inquiry-style project, a new direction for inquiry by taking it into the graduate-level classroom and not using hands-on materials, so we were calling it a "second-hand" or "second-order" inquiry. This inquiry was inspired by the mini-projects we did at the Sagan Workshop last summer (2009) when we designed our own space missions to study exoplanets. So in this inquiry, the students designed their own AO systems to study a particular science goal of their choosing. The learning goals were to learn the main components of an AO system, how they interact, the relation between error budget and image quality, the goal-driven design process, and optimization and tradeoffs. I was design-team leader and had a PDP team of 2 others. It was a challenging inquiry, as it was spread across 6 weeks and there were initially 28 students at Santa Cruz and 8 remote sites connected by video. In the end only about 14 students completed the whole thing, as a lot of students were auditing the course and got busy with final exams at their own schools. But the ones who did it said they learned a lot, really enjoyed it, and now were very interested in doing instrumentation. It was very fun and interesting, and we look forward to improving it in the future!

This is an inquiry lab I designed and taught for the PDP/ISEE.

I was a member of Oscar Azucena's design team in 2009. We designed, facilitated, and assessed an inquiry lab on Circuit Design for first-year students interested in majoring in electrical engineering technology at Maui Community College (MCC). The formal class our lab was inserted into was Electronics 101: Introduction to electronics technology. Students in this lab used the Wheatstone bridge circuit to study Thevenin equivalence and Kirchoffs's voltage law. One of our modifications to the standard scientific inquiry model to fit an engineering activity was to give the students design challenges to meet rather than scientific questions to answer. We assessed the students' presentations using a rubric.

This is an inquiry lab I designed and taught for the PDP.

I was Design Team Leader for this inquiry lab, prepared and taught in two iterations over two years with two different teams. The goal of this inquiry activity was to introduce Electrical Engineering Technology community-college students to fundamental concepts in digital image technology. The first year we taught in Electronics 201: Digital computer technology I, and the second year we taught in Electronics 102: Instrumentation for engineering technicians. During the activity, students encode an image into an image file format, the swap files and re-code the image using chalks and then on the computer. In order to reinforce the engineering concept of tradeoffs, we invented a budget in cost per pixels and colors, so that students would have to choose the spatial and color sampling they need in order to transmit their required bit of information in the image. We assessed the students' presentations using a rubric, which I pioneered in this activity before the PDP community as a whole took up this tool for formal summative assessment.

The CfAO Summer School on Adaptive Optics is taught every August in Santa Cruz. For the past several years, CfAO graduate students participating in the PDP have designed and taught three inquiry labs in the Summer School: AO Demonstrator, Fourier Optics, and AO Vision Science. I have had minor roles helping prepare and facilitate these activities in the AO summer school when needed, and also the same labs when taught in Professor Claire Max's graduate course in adaptive optics. This year I have a larger role, as I am directing all 3 labs.

After college and before grad school, I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Namibia (southwestern Africa). I taught high school chemistry and physics for two school years, 2002-2003. This was a challenging and rewarding experience, living on my own as a young adult in a foreign country. I know first-hand what it is like to be a classroom teacher, responsible for students up through twelfth grade, who have international exams to pass, up through the Higher International General Certificate of Secondary Education from Cambridge, England. My colleagues and students were beautiful people, and I truly enjoyed my time with them. Namibia is now one of my favorite places in the world, especially Vis Rivier Afgronde, Namib-Naukluft Park, and Rehoboth. I love languages and got to learn some Afrikaans (including songs!), as well as a few words and songs in Nama (Khoekhoegowab), a click language of Namibia.