After growing up in Toronto, Professor Rajagopal did his undergraduate work at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He obtained his doctorate at Princeton University in 1993 and spent three years at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. He then spent one year at Caltech before coming to MIT in 1997. He became the Associate Head of the Department of Physics in 2009, served as the Chair of the MIT faculty from 2015 to 2017 and as MIT’s Dean for Digital Learning from 2017 to 2021.

Professor Rajagopal has also described the properties of the superfluid, color superconducting, quark matter that may lie at the centers of neutron stars, providing a clear understanding of the properties of matter at extraordinarily high densities. His work shows that cold quark matter at the highest densities is the QCD analogue of a superconductor but that if you could look at it using ordinary light it would look like a transparent insulator.

Peter Dourmashkin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics at MIT. His research interests are in Mathematical Physics, Lie Group and Algebra Representation Theory. He has been part of the development, implementation, and teaching team for Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL). He has developed OCW Scholar Courses, the physics curriculum for a new university, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), and is currently working on online learning through MITx and edX.

Michelle Tomasik is a Lecturer in the Department of Physics at MIT where she currently works on developing online classes and assists with physics education research and teaching introductory physics. She received her Ph.D. in physics from MIT working on photovoltaics and density functional theory.

Alex Shvonski is a Postdoc in the Department of Physics at MIT, currently working on developing online classes. He also works with introductory physics courses at MIT, most recently creating and running in-class experiments. Alex is interested in physics education research and developing effective ways for students to interactively engage with content, for instance through hands-on experiments or simulations. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Boston College working on plasmonics.

Aidan MacDonagh is a Senior Technical Instructor in Digital Learning in the Physics Department at MIT. His work supports residential and online physics courses and physics education research. He received a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University with a focus on electric propulsion and plasma physics and has taught mechanical engineering at the polytechnic level in Singapore.