APL finds ways and money for more undergrad, prof work

It’s nicknamed the “Valerie Peyton appendix” although the formal title is “Appendix B: Modification of Eq. (54) when fluid layers are present.”

Robert Odom and Jim Mercer, both principal physicists in the Applied Physics Laboratory, were in the process of submitting the paper to the Geophysical Journal International when a careful reading by Valerie Peyton, then a senior, turned up a term in an equation that needed further clarification. The co-authors decided to put the definition in its own appendix.

“Valerie performed the same function as an external referee chosen by a journal editor,” Odom said. “She found the term needing special treatment by carefully going through all the derivations in the paper. It’s what one expects from a careful external review.”

Studying the paper wasn’t even required. Peyton was doing it in order to understand better a programming project Odom had assigned her.

Peyton is one of a growing number of undergraduate and graduate students getting chances to work on projects at the Applied Physics Laboratory. In the last decade, the number of graduate students has doubled, laboratory researchers currently sit on 67 graduate student committees, there’s a growing effort to engage undergraduates and Odom was just appointed the first associate director for education.

Odom, like the vast majority of Applied Physics Laboratory scientists and engineers who work with students, has never received state money for his salary. That’s because the lab is one of the UW’s major self-sustaining research centers, bringing in more than $27 million a year in outside funding to pay its 210 researchers, engineers and staff members. If grant and contract money dries up, so do salaries.

Odom and about 30 other laboratory staff have appointments as research faculty, affiliate faculty or faculty-without-tenure in UW academic departments. Only two have regular faculty appointments. Each year a handful receive state money through one of these departments for teaching classes. The same is not true for other APL staff who supervise students conducting research or who serve on graduate student committees.

The laboratory estimates this is a $1.8 million-a-year contribution to the UW.

No one at the laboratory is required to work with students but one of Director Robert Spindel’s goals when he came to the UW 11 years ago was to increase the lab’s role in the academic life of the University.

Today, for example: