Q&A With New Physics Teacher Dr. Viraf Mehta
New physics teacher Dr. Viraf Mehta is co-authoring a textbook on dark matter (Image via Instagram)
Written by Dawood S. ‘27
From studying in Britain and Germany to teaching physics at Browning, Dr. Viraf Mehta has had a lifelong passion for science which has informed his work not only as a teacher but as a distinguished scientist as well. The Grytte had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Mehta, the newest addition to the science department, to discuss his experience, his teaching philosophy, and vision for inspiring new scientists at Browning.
Q: Can you give us a brief background on who you are, where you grew up, and your education?
A: I grew up in the United Kingdom, just northwest of Manchester in a small town called Alwyn. I went to university there - at the University of Manchester - where I got my undergraduate and masters degrees. Then I moved across to Liverpool to do my PhD at Liverpool University. After my PhD, I moved over to Germany for a couple of post-doctoral positions and longer lecture positions, and last year, I moved over to New York City. I worked at NYU for a semester and now I'm here at Browning.
Q: How has your adjustment to New York City been?
A: New York City is a place that I both really, really love and also have difficulty with on occasion. It was a bit of a culture shock at first; it was quite a big adjustment for me to move from a place like Germany where the socio-economic inequality is not so blatantly obvious. But otherwise, I love New York City for the opportunities you have here to do anything you want to participate in, as long as you have the financial backing.
Q: How has your adjustment to Browning been?
A: My parents are both school teachers and my older sister also became one after she did her postdoc and decided she wanted to work in secondary education. After I did one semester at NYU, I was looking at various different jobs. Teaching has always appealed to me - I've always enjoyed it. Maybe not always enjoyed - when I was a PhD student, it wasn't always fun tutoring younger undergraduate students, but definitely more mature postdoc teaching and lecturing. I’ve always really enjoyed that light bulb moment in students. So I enrolled in a couple of teacher training programs, but before I got the opportunity to actually take part, I applied for the Browning job and then I thought I would give it a try. In the end, it really fit well with me.
Q: How long have you been interested in science, and what inspired you to start teaching?
A: When I was really young, I wanted to be practically everything, from popstar to ambulance driver. But then when I was around fifteen, I was really set on becoming a barrister at some big firm in the UK, because I really like talking to people and I could argue my way out of a paper bag. It was always my dream to be a lawyer, but then I was always good at math when I was younger from absorbing my older sister’s math homework. But my dreams changed when I took law when I was seventeen or eighteen, and I didn't do as well as I would have liked. In the end it made me realize how subjective law is in terms of examination - that put me off a little bit, as I was really used to seeing work as either right or wrong. It didn't agree with my young male mindset that there could be a gray, so I dropped law and I took physics at university. Since then, I haven’t looked back. I actually read a book about Einstein's theories of relativity when I was 17, which was recommended to me by my physics teacher at the time, and that made me absolutely fall in love with the subject.
Q: What grades do you teach here at Browning, and what has your experience with them been like so far?
A: I started just after spring break last year and now I’m teaching eleventh, twelfth, eighth and sixth grade. Sixth grade was a big shock for me coming from college, because I was used to teaching graduate students. This year, I teach some eighth graders, and I like it. At that level, teaching isn’t so much about deep content, but we still get to do labs and really see how physics is everywhere. That’s the kind of concept that I'm trying to introduce to them. With my 11th and 12th graders, it's really then the act of translating all the physics that they know is all around them into a universal language, and that universal language is mathematics.
Q: How would you describe your teaching style? How do you try to help aspiring scientists at Browning?
A: Because I've been working with physics for a very long time, I have a fairly deep knowledge and I think that that is very helpful for inspiring students when they have random questions about physical phenomena that they've heard about so oftentimes; I had a new book recently and so oftentimes my students in class will ask me about dark matter, about astrophysics, about things that I've researched, and I'm able to explain it in a way that is at least partly accessible. I think that this is something that I've always tried to do, even at university - to make physics accessible to where you're at, not where I am. It's all well and good for me to be able to talk to someone else with a PhD and tell them about my research, but the real difficulty is telling someone who doesn't have that physics knowledge. Science communication as a skill is something that I’ve developed over a long time, and it’s integral to my teaching. You have these physical principles, like Newton’s three laws, but what do they really mean in our day-to-day lives? That connection is something I’ve tried my best to bring to the classroom.
Q: How has coaching a Browning sports team been like?
A: I'm the assistant coach for Browning’s varsity soccer team with Coaches Kelly and Hack. It was an eye opening experience for me simply because I’d never experienced U.S. high school sports before. Both Kelly and Hack are pretty experienced; I myself am not such an experienced soccer player, but definitely a watcher - I’ve grown up with the sport all around me my whole life. It’s been a very fun experience also to see the boys kind of develop as a team throughout the season. I think if we'd have started the season in a similar fashion to the way we ended the season. Next year, we're going to lose a few seniors, who are strong players, but I’ve heard that some guys are coming up through the JV and 7-8 team, so I definitely have high hopes. With a coaching staff of coaches Kelly and Hack, I think any team can do well.
Q: You're co-authoring an upcoming book - what is it about, and what in it are you proudest of?
A: I was lucky enough to work with a global expert on dark matter at my previous university; we delivered a course on dark matter and were then asked to make that into a book. What I'm most proud about the book is the fact that a graduate student like myself working with string theory and dark matter would find it useful. It’s also not just the textbook, which is itself really accessible, but we also have online interactive exercises so that the students can replace plots and graphs in the book. Apart from the fact that you need at least a background in the subject, in the past it’s really been the math which makes things like this inaccessible.
Q: What should we be looking forward to from you in the future? What are your aspirations in the scientific field?
A: As the only physics teacher at Browning, I hope to use my background in physics to add depth to the curriculum. The curriculum the school has had over the years has been really good, but I'm also hoping to add at least my depth of knowledge so that I can communicate the topic to kids so that they can both understand and connect these topics in their minds rather than keeping these topics in separate silos. For example, we teach energy because physicists think about physics through the lens of energy, even though most high school physics courses just start with forces. In the future, I'm hoping to add more interconnection into not just physics but with other subjects as well - everything from chemistry and biology to even English and history through scientists who have changed the world. I hope to be able to connect with our History and English departments in order to explore these matters in a more interdisciplinary way. In the scientific field, it’s unclear if I’ll write another book - it was a lot of work and years of focused energy. Despite that, I'm also a visiting scholar at NYU and I have collaborators there, so I’m still reasonably active in my field and work on various research papers. I would really like to be able to both participate in active research in my field as well as delivering my curricula to the kids here at Browning. I think it’ll also be quite helpful for the kids to have some connection to the real bleeding edge of research in theoretical physics.