Jeff Larsen has come a long way from being a Hancock kid at the Morris High School. The road that led him from that rural Minnesota past to his present position teaching physics at the United States Naval Academy in Maryland is peppered with some interesting explorations in the world of astronomy.

It wasn't hard for Jeff to settle on the college he wanted to attend. UMM had already been a big part of his life thanks to it's many connections to school kids in the community.

"In grade school, I participated in microteaching and in high school, I attended the Creative Institute each summer, taking jazz, photography and computers," he recalls. "Every spring the district music contests were held at UMM and many of our school plays had directors and assistant directors who were UMM students. My older sister also attended UMM and I really wanted to get to do the things she did."

Jeff's interest in physics and astronomy was set at an even earlier age. He remembers as a little kid being glued to the TV watching Apollo moon landings and quoting details of the explorations to his parents.  

"I was always interested in space," says Jeff.   "Then, of course, there was the original Star Trek.   I remember being in awe of all that technology and wanting to grow up being a part of it."

However, it wasn't a forgone conclusion that Jeff would end up in physics when he first came to UMM. He found history and anthropology also interesting.   He credits his friend at that time, Brad Abbott, for encouraging him to pursue studies in physics. There, he began to accumulate memories that still give him a smile.

"Oh, there were the all-nighters in the physics lab (wouldn't everyone like to do that?), Agoraphobia, playing laser tag in HFA until we got caught by security, Flatlands, trying to find and explore the heating tunnels, being in Jazz under Doc Carlson, Prof. Latterell's chemistry class (and falling for his old joke of looking into and shaking the test tube to tell you what was in it in qualitative analysis), taking relativity with Prof. Togeas (who would probably be shocked after my exams to find that I teach it at USNA now) and having professors like Dr. Korth and Prof. Nangia who literally knew it all!"

Jeff also recalls working with Dr. Korth on his superfluid He-3 research and his attempt to write a computer program to solve the wave propagation equations.

"I was pretty green, so the introduction was more about learning how to do research than the research itself," he observes. "I enjoyed belonging to something bigger than myself where the answer was not going to be found in any books.   It was a bit frightening.   I spent quite a bit of time coding a program to do the algebra of the differential equations and drove to Minneapolis to use Walter Library in a literature search.   Remember, online journals didn't exist yet. The project really helped me learn how to do research!"

When Jeff left UMM, he attended graduate school in Astrophysics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and graduated in August of 1996.  

He believes the solid education and experiences in how to learn and to organize research efforts as a UMM undergrad stood him well as a graduate student.

"I had taken every physics course offered, along with courses in mathematics and chemistry which gave me a very good background.   In addition, I got to enjoy this wide variety of activities outside of physics that made me feel very well rounded compared to some of my grad school classmates who had been forced into specializing very early at large universities," he says.

"During my first few weeks in grad school I felt very intimidated initially because so many of the other new grad students already had done so many impressive sounding undergraduate research projects.   I didn't have to worry, because UMM gave me enough preparation to perform well in classes and the research opportunities came later as a result."

When asked about his graduate studies, Jeff says with contained amusement, "I counted stars."  

He goes on to explain that by finding areas with the greatest concentration of stars, one finds regions with the strongest gravity and this helps the researcher to better understand the distribution of mass.    Counting stars is more complicated than it sounds because dust and gas dim their light. However, it is one of the only ways to study the effects of gravity on the formation and evolution of galaxies.

While counting stars proved tedious, Jeff did learn from his advisor how to scan and calibrate the positions and brightness of stars. He was part of her team that created digital catalogs of stars and galaxies that can still be used today. (http://aps.umn.edu).

"In the end, with the catalogs we created, I found that the halo of our galaxy was not as round as some people had considered and found that the distribution of stars way out of the disk of the Galaxy was not symmetric around the Galactic Center," Jeff reports. "There are more of a certain class of star on one side of the sky than on the other.   The cause of this asymmetry has not been explained to this day, although I'm now involved in a project to figure it out!"

While working to complete his PhD, Jeff took a job at Spacewatch, a group based out of the University of Arizona, Tucson.   Spacewatch's primary goal is to explore populations of small objects in the solar system, and study the statistics of asteroids and comets.

Working at Spacewatch, according to Jeff, meant that he "got to find all kinds of interesting stuff." That "stuff" included discovering five comets, the 17th moon of Jupiter and a host of near-earth asteroids.

"The basic idea to discover comets electronically is to take several pictures over time and find the moving objects. When the data is being taken, you sit in the control room and watch the picture come in. The rule was if you could find the comet before it was automatically detected as a moving object, it was your discovery.   Otherwise the comet would be named after Spacewatch," Jeff recalls.

"It was late in the night when I saw something that looked a bit fuzzy on the screen. It didn't look like a galaxy and so I marked it as a possible comet.   When the second picture came in, I checked and it was a moving object.   Woohoo, a comet!   P/1997 V1 (Larsen) was discovered on November 3, 1997."

When a research position opened up at Spacewatch, Jeff decided to go for it.   They were looking for a person who could update computer systems for their asteroid search and analyze the compiled data. Jeff had the right combination of programming and observing experience to land the job.

"My first (and probably most important) contribution to Spacewatch was to modernize their detection software and computers," says Jeff. "They hired me to develop new software and a new system.   I wrote a program that finds moving objects and presents a list to the observer for them to say, 'yes this is an asteroid,' or 'no this is not an asteroid.'"

Jeff worked at Starwatch from 1997-2004 and loved it. " I found my wife and started my family there and worked with some of the best people in the world on cutting edge stuff," he says. "My work was useful and interesting to humanity as a whole -- how often does a person get to do something like that and yet have an immense amount of fun?!"

Jeff also ended up collaborating with a faculty member of the U.S. Naval Academy and her students on an asteroid project.   When he was told of a physics position at the Academy opening up in 2004, he interviewed and was hired to teach there.

"Despite a career which was pure research, I still had the desire to teach," he says. "The Academy is a wonderful place where my teaching could make a difference and I could still keep my hand in at Spacewatch and with my research at the University of Minnesota."

Unlike the other service academies, USNA maintains an approximately 50:50 ratio between civilian and military professors.   Jeff finds it to have many similarities to a small college like UMM.

"The Academy is very careful to make sure that I am available for one-on-one interactions for every level of student and so the experience is obviously very enriching!" says Jeff. "If I were to find a difference it is in the amount of discipline that they have to have -- it is much higher than I would have shown at the same age."

Because USNA is an engineering school, all students are required to take both physics and calculus. That means Intro to Physics is part of Jeff's yearly teaching load. Astronomy and Observational Astrophysics also enter into the mix.

"And I am currently teaching my favorite class, the one that Dr. Korth taught me to love: Modern Physics.   It is the course where you test the best of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics.   Without this physics we wouldn't have GPS satellites, nuclear power or semiconductors," Jeff observes.

"Modern physics is not intuitive and so it is a wonderful thing to explore in lab. When your students work with it the reactions make for such a rewarding experience!"

In addition to a full teaching load, Jeff continues his astronomical research. Winter break finds him back at Spacewatch doing more observations and solving computer software problems. In October of 2007, with the help of an NSF grant, Jeff will travel to Chile to gather data for research with his former advisor. They will explore the asymmetric star distribution question he asked so many years ago.

"In Chile, I will use one of their telescopes to take survey pictures of the Southern sky to complement the ones from the Northern sky we already have," he says. "All in all, more fun things to do than there is time available!"

Jeff Larsen, UMM '89 physics grad

Inspiring image for a future physicist

Image of a spiral galaxy

Spacewatch observatory photo from Jeff Larsen

No, it's not Jeff's comet, but we loved the image so much, we picked this one as a good example. This happens to be the famous Hale-Bopp comet of 1997.

Spacewatch telescope photo from Jeff Larsen

The Chapel building at USNA

Spacewatch observatory photo from Jeff Larsen