Dr. Moffett, with the dome of the Timmons Planetarium in the background.

David Moffett

Professor of Physics

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Originally from North Carolina, Moffett is a first-generation college student. After acquiring his B.S. and M.S. at North Carolina State University, he moved to New Mexico Tech to conduct his doctoral research on pulsars using the Very Large Array radio interferometer. He met and married his wife Cathi in Los Alamos, NM. The Moffett family then moved to Hobart, Tasmania, where David worked as a research astronomer at the University of Tasmania. After two and a half years, Moffett secured a position in the Physics Department at Furman, where he continues to conduct radio astronomy research with Physics majors and with collaborators at national and international universities.

Moffett oversees the Timmons Planetarium (on campus) and Furman's observatory (off-campus). In addition to astronomy, he teaches general physics courses and upper-level mechanics and electromagnetic theory courses. Moffett also serves as the engineering dual-degree advisor.

Honors

  • ​​Henry Keith and Ellen Hard Townes Professor of Physics (2008 - 2010)
  • Sigma Pi Sigma National Physics Honor Society

Education

  • Ph.D Physics (Astrophysics), New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
  • M.S. Physics, North Carolina State University
  • B.S. Physics, North Carolina State University

Research Interests

Moffett collaborates with faculty from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to host the annual Educational Research In Radio Astronomy (ERIRA) workshop at the Greenbank Observatory in West Virginia. Moffett was the Co-PI of the grant "Next-Level, Robotic Telescope-Based Observing Experiences to Boost STEM Enrollments and Majors", funded by the Department of Defense. The grant team has produced a radio astronomy laboratory curriculum, "MWU! - the Multiwavelength Universe", where undergraduate institutions can utilize a 20-meter radio telescope at the Greenbank Observatory. Three additional telescopes managed by the University of Tasmania will be added to the remote telescope network in the near future.

When not involved in astronomy education development, Moffett continues to perform radio astronomical observations of Galactic supernova remnants and optical observations of eclipsing cataclysmic binary stars.

Publications

Next-Level Robotic Telescope-Based Observing Experiences to Boost STEM Enrollments and Majors on a National Scale: Year 1 Report.
D. Reichart, J. Haislip, V. Kouprianov, R. Fu, L. Selph, S. Xu, J. Torian, J. Keohane, D. Janzen, D. Moffett, and S. Converse
ASP 2022: A Virtual Conference, ASP Conference Series, Vol. 537, Proceedings of the Conference held 8-10 December 2022, online. Ed. By Greg Schultz, Jonathan Barnes, and Linda Shore. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, p. 52 (2024). https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02545;

Magnetic Structures and Turbulence in SN 1006 Revealed with Imaging X-ray Polarimetry
P. Zhou and 101 more authors, Astrophysical Journal, vol. 957, p. 55 (2023). https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acf3e6

Additional Professional Activities

  • American Astronomical Society
  • American Association of Variable Star Observers
  • International Astronomical Union

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