Mullan Offers Students Big Questions, Practical Experience

Brendan Mullan explores intersections between physics and pretty much everything else.

"The essence of physics is asking fundamental questions about space and time and how everything works," said Mullan, an associate teaching professor and director of Undergraduate Laboratories in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Physics. "Asking those questions is something that's really primal about us as a species. It's the essence of humanity, more than any other characteristic."

Mullan, who joined Carnegie Mellon in January 2024, brings a broad range of experiences to the classroom from research scientist and educator at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science to director of the Buhl Planetarium and Observatory.

He focused on astrophysics because he said that choosing that subfield was a jumping-off point for asking bigger questions that encompass everything else.

"Planets wrap fields like environmental science, biology and geology in a bubble. Then Solar systems have stars and planets; and galaxies have all of that plus other stuff like black holes, neutron stars and nebulae," he said. "For me, it felt like the bigger you go, the more you get to discover through asking bigger and more encompassing questions. That, in turn, can give insight into smaller ones underneath."

Mullan developed and taught astronomy, astrobiology and physics courses at a number of universities, employing novel video game, narrative story and inquiry-based elements. At Carnegie Mellon, he guides the ongoing evolution of experimental physics courses using data-informed practices and physics education research. He teaches introductory courses such as 33-100 Basic Experimental Physics, 33-104 Experimental Physics and 33-340 Modern Physics Laboratory.

"Lab courses are the original active learning courses," Mullan said. "When students get to experiment and do things for themselves, they can construct their own meaning and really think about the process that got them there. Our lab courses really stress measurement, uncertainty and propagating uncertainties and how that affects the precision and accuracy of the final results."

He said that foundational science and experimental science teaches students how to know whether something is true or not, which is important to keep in mind as more and more research involves automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

"Like, how do you know that a measurement is this value? Or how far off a prediction are you? How much do you trust your data?" he said. "I think the danger is that you can easily lose sight of what's going on in a complex process, so you want students to know how to think critically about data."

Among  awards and accolades from the British Council and the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, Mullan won a national NASA Astrobiology Famelab science communication competition in 2012 while a graduate student at The Pennsylvania State University. The following year, he was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. In 2014, he was named director of Buhl Planetarium and Observatory at Carnegie Science Center.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Mullan was an associate professor at Point Park University, and he was the director of science for the Wrinkled Brain Project, which provided a new approach to science education for middle school students.

"One of the things that I used to do was try to bring inquiry-based education into classrooms everywhere," he said. "That work still finds a home in what I do today."