A University of British Columbia professor will be working at the White House, the U.S. Senate confirmed Thursday.
Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman will be associate director of science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Wieman’s new job will nab him from his position as director of UBC’s five-year, $12-million project to improve science education, the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI).
Over the past three years, CWSEI has benefited more than 18,000 UBC students across seven science departments.
One technique Wieman champions is the use of “clickers” that each student uses in class to answer multiple-choice questions.
Sarah Gilbert, associate director of CWSEI, will act in Wieman’s place as he takes unpaid leave from UBC until July 2012.
Wieman shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics for creating a form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate.
