Image of Corinne Manogue

Contact Info

Primary Title: 
Faculty
Email Contact: 
Voice Contact: 
(541) 737-1695
Office: 
Weniger 493

Corinne Manogue studied black holes with Denis Sciama and field theory in curved spacetime with Bryce DeWitt, obtaining her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984.  After postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Durham in England, and as an Indo-American Fellow of the CIES, she joined the physics faculty at Oregon State University in 1988.

From its inception in 1996 until her retirement in 2022, Professor Manogue was the driving force behind the Paradigms in Physics project at OSU, a complete redesign of the physics major.  This redesign involved both a rearrangement of the content to better reflect the way professional physicists think about the field and also the use of a number of interactive pedagogies that place responsibility for learning more firmly in the hands of students.  This project has been supported continuously through 12 grants from the NSF.  The project website articulates the details of many of the courses, as well as  more than 300 group activities.  Professor Manogue remains an active member of the OSU PER group.

Professor Manogue is the recipient of a number of teaching awards, among them the 2008 David Halliday and Robert Resnick Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the American Association of Physics Teachers.  She was voted a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2005 and named a Fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2014.

After more than three decades in her career, she continues to be amazed to find herself a physicist.

Professor Manogue's Curriculum Vitae

Education

1984 PhD, Physics, The University of Texas
1977 AB Mathematics and Physics, Mount Holyoke College, Summa Cum Laude

Research

Research Description: 
Corinne Manogue's curriculum development/research interests are in helping students make the difficult transition from lower-division to upper-division physics. Research questions that fascinate her are: (1) How do students learn to "think like physicists"? (2) How do students develop professional, metacognitive habits of mind? (3) How do students learn to use multiple representations, geometric and harmonic reasoning in their problem solving? (4) How do students' personal epistemologies change as they enter the upper division? (5) How do faculty learn to teach in ways that foster the changes listed above? (6) How can we help students build the same rich concept images of physics/mathematics concepts that are held by experts? In her traditional research in theoretical quantum gravity, she played a key role in the early work relating division algebras and supersymmetry. In her infinite free time, she continues to explore how to use the octonions to describe the symmetries of high energy particle physics.