Michael Dennin 
Vice Provost of Teaching and Learning; Dean of Undergraduate Education; Professor of Physics | UC Irvine
Irvine, CA, UNITED STATES
Prof. Dennin is leading the evolution of teaching and learning on the college campus, and he is a top communicator of all issues of physics.
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Biography
Professor Dennin earned his A. B. from Princeton University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He held a postdoctoral position at UCLA. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar.
Professor Dennin's main research interest is systems that exhibit emergent properties. These include the behavior of complex fluids, such as foam and sand, as well as the complex dynamics of biological systems.
Professor Dennin is well-known for popularizing science for the public. He has taught many online courses on the nature of science, including team teaching a MOOC based on the television program, The Walking Dead. He has appeared on a number of television programs, including Spider-man Tech, Batman Tech, Star Wars Tech, and Ancient Aliens.
Areas of Expertise (6)
Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Condensed Matter Physics
Undergraduate Education
Physics
Biophysics
Science of super heros
Accomplishments (5)
UCI Senate Distinguished mid-Career Award for Service (professional)
2011 - 2012
UCI Award for Instructional Technology (professional)
2008 - 2009
UCI Extension UCI Irvine Faculty Award (professional)
2008 - 2009
UCI Academice Senate Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching (professional)
2007
UCI Teaching Excellence Award, School of Physical Sciences (professional)
2006
Education (2)
University of California, Santa Barbara: PhD, Physics 1995
Princeton University: AB, Physics 1988
Affiliations (3)
- American Physics Society
- American Association of Teachers
- American Association for Advancement of Science
Links (6)
Media Appearances (8)
How the idea of ‘excellence’ can be misleading in higher education
Times Higher Education online
2023-05-05
Michael Dennin, UCI professor of physics and astronomy, dean of undergraduate education and vice-provost for teaching and learning writes, “In March the University of California, Irvine hosted the Waypoints Symposium. This meeting brought together representatives from more than 30 institutions to discuss questions in higher education, especially around equity and inclusion. Among the exciting ideas and themes, two stood out to me in particular: the challenge of time for both students and faculty, and the concept of “excellence”. These themes reminded me of several key learning moments in my career.”
ChatGPT is Everywhere
The Chronicle of Higher Education online
2023-03-06
Michael Dennin, vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of California, Irvine, expects to see a lot of experimentation on his campus as instructors sort out what tools are appropriate to use at each stage of a student’s career. It reminds him of what his mother, a high-school math teacher, went through when graphing calculators were introduced. The initial reaction was to ban them; the right answer, he says, was to embrace and use them to enhance learning. “It was a multiyear process with a lot of trying and testing and evaluating and assessing.”
Science vs. Faith / UFO Investigations
Coast to Coast AM radio
2022-03-17
Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California- Irvine, Michael Dennin is well-known for popularizing science for the public. In the first half, he discussed miracles, free will, and why science and faith do not have to exist in conflict. The "fullness of reality" could be thought of as God, he suggested. We can ponder the properties of God, he said: "If you're a religious person, you're going to say that God knows you...and has some sort of relationship with you," and "what an atheist is really saying is that reality has no consciousness, no connection to people." Prayer could be thought of as a kind of non-physical communication with God, he added.
Business Journal’s 2020 Innovators Keep Winning
Orange County Business Journal online
2021-08-10
Featured in Chapter 10 Innovators.
How the pandemic changed higher education in California
EdSource online
2021-03-17
Michael Dennin, UC Irvine’s vice provost for teaching and learning, said Newsom’s proposal reinforces a “false dichotomy” by pitting online vs. in-person classes. Rather than focusing on increasing the percentage of online classes, Dennin said colleges and their faculty should use what they’ve learned during the pandemic to teach each class in the most effective way possible. He predicted that would result in many more hybrid courses that mix online and in-person elements.
What Will Post-Pandemic College Classrooms Look Like For UC Schools?
Laist online
2021-01-21
“The pandemic, I hate to say this, has been our friend,” Michael Dennin, UC Irvine’s vice provost of teaching and learning, told the Regents Academic and Student Affairs committee on Wednesday. “It's allowed us to experience even deeper: what does it mean to be a UC course?”
Do Spider-Man, Superman break the laws of physics?
OCRegister online
2020-02-03
“The force of Lois Lane is actually less if she just hits the ground then if Superman catches her, unless he catches her in a very specific way,” said Michael Dennin, professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine and one of the presenters Saturday. “The cool thing about superheroes when it comes to physics is some of what they do is consistent with the law of physics and some of what they do is not.”
Reevaluating teacher evaluations in higher education
Physics Today online
2020-01-01
“We were concerned about bias, and also about random nastiness that didn’t seem warranted,” says Michael Dennin, a physicist who serves as vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The university put into practice a long-ignored policy to require additional evidence about teaching, and has revamped the surveys. “We are consistent with the national focus,” Dennin says, “which is to move toward language that asks the students to assess experience in the classroom rather than to directly assess the professor.” It’s still early, he adds, but the shift seems to reduce bias. The UCI student experience surveys have replaced numerical ratings with categories from “strongly agree” through “strongly disagree” because psychology studies suggest that people give more thought to questions when so formulated.
Articles (5)
Exact Solution of a Strongly Coupled Gauge Theory in 0 + 1 Dimensions
Physical Review LettersChethan Krishnan and K. V. Pavan Kumar
2018 Gauged tensor models are a class of strongly coupled quantum mechanical theories. We present the exact analytic solution of a specific example of such a theory: namely, the smallest colored tensor model due to Gurau and Witten that exhibits nonlinearities. We find explicit analytic expressions for the eigenvalues and eigenstates, and the former agree precisely with previous numerical results on (a subset of) eigenvalues of the ungauged theory. The physics of the spectrum, despite the smallness of N, exhibits rudimentary signatures of chaos.
Quantifying flow and stress in ice mélange, the world’s largest granular material
Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesJustin C. Burton, Jason M. Amundson, Ryan Cassotto, Chin-Chang Kuo, and Michael Dennin
2018 Ice mélange, a granular collection of broken icebergs ranging from tens of meters to hundreds of meters in size, sits in front of many of the Earth’s most active tidewater glaciers. In addition to influencing heat and mass transport in the ocean, the jam-packed mélange provides a geophysical living laboratory to test principles developed for small-scale granular materials such as sand.
Bubble ribbons under imposed flow
Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering AspectsChin-Chang Kuo, Alex Levine, Michael Dennin
2017 Bubble rafts consisting of a single layer of bubbles floating on the surface of water have proven to be an important model system for studying materials ranging from crystalline systems to amorphous solids to complex fluids. An interesting question in foams and complex fluids is how the detailed nature of the bubble–bubble interactions determines the resulting stable states of the system, especially in the context of different approaches to generating the foam or complex fluid.
Understanding flow and stress in ice mélange: the world's largest granular material
AGU Fall Meeting AbstractsBurton, J. C.; Amundson, J. M.; Cassotto, R.; Kuo, C. C.; Dennin, M.
2017 In tidewater glacial fjords, the open water in front of the glacier terminus is often filled with a collection of calved iceberg fragments and sea ice. For glaciers with large calving rates, this "mélange" of ice can be jam-packed, so that the flow is mostly determined by granular interactions. In the jammed state, ice mélange can potentially influence the stress balance on the glacier terminus, calving rates of icebergs, dispersion and attenuation of ocean waves, injection of freshwater into fjords, and fjord circulation, although detailed measurements of ice mélange are lacking due to the inherent dangers of instrumenting remote, ice-choked fjords.
Stable small bubble clusters in two-dimensional foams
Soft MatterKai Zhang, Chin-Chang Kuo, Nathaniel See, Corey O'Hern, Michael Dennin
2017 Key features of the mechanical response of amorphous particulate materials, such as foams, emulsions, and granular media, to applied stress are determined by the frequency and size of particle rearrangements that occur as the system transitions from one mechanically stable state to another. This work describes coordinated experimental and computational studies of bubble rafts, which are quasi-two dimensional systems of bubbles confined to the air–water interface.
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