 Contact Information:
Office: Science Building 150
Phone: 616-526-6275
Fax: 616-526-6501
email: dvanbaak @ calvin.edu
Mail: 1734 Knollcrest Circle SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4403
Education:
Ph.D., Harvard, 1979
Research Interests:
Professor Van Baak has been at Calvin since 1980 (after post-doctoral work at JILA in Boulder), and has spent leaves on sabbatical at Notre Dame and NIST, and on a Fulbright Fellowship at University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland. Grants from Research Corporation and the National Science Foundation have enabled his work with students on the spectroscopy of hydrogen atoms and tests of inverse-square gravity. In the 1990s he hosted NSF-sponsored workshops for college and university faculty on diode-laser applications to undergraduate instruction. Since 2001 he has been a collaborator with TeachSpin, Inc., working on the commercial dissemination of apparatus for advanced undergraduate laboratory experiments.
On the Calvin/TeachSpin Collaboration:
Q: What is TeachSpin, anyway?
A: TeachSpin is a small company, based in Buffalo, NY, "dedicated to creating
rugged, reliable, and affordable hands-on instruments that any physicist, no
matter what his or her area of expertise, can incorporate into an advanced
laboratory program."
Q: What is the Calvin connection?
A: TeachSpin collaborates with physicists who have developed ideas or
instruments locally, by seeing to the manufacture and distribution of
instruments; and several innovations from Calvin College are in the production
or development stage at TeachSpin.
Q: When did this get started?
A: Calvin professor David Van Baak got to meet CEO Jonathan Reichert at
the TeachSpin display booth at a scientific meeting in 2001, and there learned
about this policy of collaboration.
Q: What has happened since?
A1: There have been a variety of Calvin-based innovations that have ended
up in the TeachSpin product line, starting with "Two-Slit interference, One
Photon at a Time" that was born as a advanced lab semester project by Calvin
physics student Andrew VandenHeuvel.
A2: And after a grant from the Doc de Vries fund made it possible for
Calvin to purchase TeachSpin's "Earth's Field NMR" apparatus, Van Baak built
local improvements which have become the basis of another TeachSpin product,
the "EF-NMR Gradient/Field Coils". These make available to other users a
wonderful suite of experiments in nuclear magnetic resonance, and the physics
of magnetic resonance imaging.
A3: Support from the Spoelhof Externship program, and from TeachSpin, has
allowed Van Baak to spend a semester, recent summers, and interim 2007 working
with TeachSpin on a whole list of future product offerings. Most recently
emerging has been "Modern Interferometry", a kit allowing several versions of
ultra-senstive optical investigations.
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