Dr. Matt Caplan
- About
- Awards & Honors
Biography
Dr. Caplan joined ISU in the fall of 2019. His PhD from Indiana University in 2017 won the Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics from the APS, and prior to joining ISU Dr. Caplan was a CITA National Fellow at the McGill Space Institute.
At ISU, he is the chair of the Twelve Thousand Bombs seminar series on nuclear weapons. Outside academia, he is a writer and scientific consultant for the YouTube channels "In a Nutshell" by Kurzgesagt and "PBS Space Time" by PBS Digital Studio, with writing credits on nearly 100 videos with combined view counts of a billion.
In 2021, Dr. Caplan was an inaugural Next-Generation Fellow of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction. He won a Cottrell Scholar Award in 2023, he is a Kavli Scholar of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB (2022-2024), and he is a co-investigator of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Electrodynamics of Compact Sources (SCEECS).
Current Courses
390.019Computational Research In Physics
299.019Independent Honor Study
499.001Independent Research in Physics
287.019Independent Study
490.001Research Development in Physics
290.019Research In Physics
390.019Computational Research In Physics
299.019Independent Honor Study
499.001Independent Research in Physics
220.001Mechanics I
220.002Mechanics I
205.001Origin Of The Universe
490.019Research Development in Physics
290.019Research In Physics
407.001Seminar in Physics
Research Interests & Areas
Stars freeze. At the end of their lives stars cool and contract forming white dwarfs and neutron stars. In these extremely dense environments nuclei can be packed so closely that they freeze solid, forming materials many trillions of times denser than anything on earth. Dr. Caplan uses large scale computer simulations to study these 'astromaterials' and calculate their physical properties to interpret astronomical observations of dead stars.