Robert J. Thornton, Jr. Assistant Professor Department of Physics West Chester University

I joined the faculty at West Chester in the fall of 2008. I was an undergraduate at Lehigh University, where I received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. The engineering program at Lehigh, although pretty rigorous, really was a great experience and prepared me well for things to come. In my later years at Lehigh I became more interested and active in astronomy. So, after finishing my engineering requirements, I stayed at Lehigh to get a B.S. in Physics in preparation for a graduate program in astronomy.

I received my Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2002. During my time in Hawaii I worked on instruments for a number of different telescopes, both on Mauna Kea on the Big Island and on Haleakala on Maui. Due to its location and terrain, Hawaii is a great place for astronomy and has telescopes from countries all over the world. Right before coming to West Chester, I was doing similar work at the University of Pennsylvania on the 6-meter ACT telescope and its commissioning camera, MBAC. The telescope and camera are are now working together at the site in the Atacama Desert in Chile at an altitude of 17,400 ft (5290 meters), looking at the cosmic microwave background and searching for galaxy clusters at millimeter wavelengths.

In between graduate school and my time at Penn, I worked at Texas Children's Hospital and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where I tried something very different than astronomy but equally fascinating. There is a kind of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique called Magnetic Resonace Spectroscopy (MRS) that, instead of producing images, focusses on a specific region of tissue and is able to determine what chemicals are present in that tissue. We were using this technique to study various brain-related disorders, including tumors, seizures, and traumatic brain injury. People often give Houston a bad rap due to its often hot and humid weather. But despite this, Houston really is a great city for a number of reasons, one of which is the annual Texas Livestock Show/Rodeo.