Physics and Engineering Faculty and Student Research

Dr. Jim Schroeder

Wheaton Space Plasma Physics Laboratory - (L to R) Nathaniel Tarullo (’26), Josh Whelan (’27), Maia Peterson (’27), Julia Nordstrom (’25). The pink glow behind Maia's head is plasma.
More about the WSPPL Research

Dr. Robert Bishop

Dr. Bishop's research involves the history and philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of social science, philosophy of mind and psychology, and metaphysics. He is particularly interested in chaos and complex systems and their philosophical implications.

Dr. Darren Craig

Dr. Craig is an experimental plasma physicist. His research is on problems important for the confinement of hot plasmas for magnetic fusion energy and related problems in naturally occurring plasmas in space and astrophysics.

Read more about Dr. Craig's Research 

---

Dr. Anna Hancock

This is where Dr. Anna Hancock, an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Wheaton College, contributes. During her doctoral research at Princeton University, Hancock became interested in how bacteria respond to their environment and how their surroundings can affect antibiotic treatment. One of her main research projects investigated why antibiotics sometimes fail to kill bacteria living together in spatially structured populations, called biofilms. Her team specifically studied how local nutrient concentration, or the “food” available to bacteria, affects antibiotic treatment.

Her most recent paper, titled “A nutrient bottleneck controls antibiotic efficacy in structured bacterial populations,” reports that nutrient availability can determine how effectively antibiotics kill large bacterial populations resembling clinical biofilms. When bacteria did not have enough nutrients, they became less metabolically active and were much harder to kill, even when exposed to very high concentrations of antibiotics. When nutrients such as glucose were locally available, the bacteria became more active and easier for the antibiotic to kill. When nutrients are introduced only to one surface of a 3D bacterial population, they can activate a “death front”, a wave-like movement of bacterial death that travels from the nutrient exposed surface of the population to the interior. Hancock quantified how adding more nutrients can make this “death front” faster while a denser bacterial population that consumes nutrients more quickly can slow it down, a phenomena that was theoretically predicted decades ago, but never before visualized. . However, more food wasn’t always the answer – if the antibiotic concentration was too low, additional nutrients could also allow surviving resistant bacteria to grow again.

As a next step, Hancock is interested in studying heteroresistance, in which a very small fraction of bacteria can survive antibiotic treatment differently from the majority of the population. Understanding why these cells behave differently and how they affect larger bacterial communities remains an ongoing challenge she hopes to explore at Wheaton College. She also hopes to involve students in the department’s summer research program, training them during the spring semester and continuing their work over the summer. This will mark the inaugural start of the Hancock Lab at Wheaton!

Antibiotic failure is more complicated than simply finding a stronger drug. Hancock hopes her research can help address antibiotic resistance and treatment failure, especially in low-resource countries where its effects can be especially serious. Continued research is essential to prevent antibiotic failure from becoming an even greater threat, and potentially a leading cause of death by 2050.