About the Authors

E. J. Bahng is an associate professor in the School of Education, and equity advisor in the College of Human Sciences at Iowa State University, Ames, IA. She has recently been elected as Gender Advisor for the Muon Collider collaboration at CERN. She develops interdisciplinary and integrated STEM and the Arts-based (STEAM) curricula and mentoring programs that are rooted in the Communities of Practice (COP) and storytellilng approaches. In 2020, she co-authored Children Doing Physics: How to Foster the Natural Scientific Instincts in Children. Since 2019, she is a member of the ISU Sustainable Peace Faculty Learning Community and, since 2021, a co-convener of the Critical Friends Faculty Learning Community for Multilingual Multicultural Women of STEM. She is a daughter, a sister, and also writes children’s books, Aari’s Arirang Adventure, Bird’s WAY, Grand Mothers.

John Hauptman is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at ISU and a research physicist in elementary particle physics. He teaches a wide variety of courses but most recently he concentrates on the physics course for elementary teacher candidates in which the hands-on experiments and measurements include most areas of physics and are directly adaptable to the elementary classroom.  He also developed and taught the interdisciplinary Newspaper Physics ISU Learning Community course as well as Honors courses that combined physics with English and physics with philosophy.  As an experimental particle physicist, he has been involved in various international, national, and regional experiments at several physics laboratories and now focuses on a novel experiment with professor Sehwook Lee to search for magnetic monopoles at Kyungpook National University in Daegu, Korea.