When she was a senior at Randolph, Kacey Meaker ’08 jokingly told a friend that one day she would return here to teach.

“One thing that has changed is how much Randolph’s physics program has grown. There are so many more physics majors than there were when I was here. They’re very motivated.”

In the classroom, Meaker strives to share her love for physics with students and encourage them to think critically. She also shows them how various concepts in physics are a part of everyday life.

“Understanding relativity is necessary for your GPS to work correctly,” she said. “And without quantum mechanics, none of your computers will work and you can’t build one. People know physics is important, but they don’t think about how it applies to their life on a day-to-day basis.”

Other than reading, volunteer work is one of Meaker’s favorite hobbies. While at Berkeley, she taught classes at San Quentin State Prison, helping inmates earn their associate’s degrees. In the Lynchburg area, she travels to Brook Hill Farm, a horse rescue and therapeutic riding center in Forest, twice a week, where she rides the horses and works with the at-risk youth who attend programs. She also helped with the Randolph SUPER program and taught high school students about fluid dynamics with the College’s Science Saturdays program.

Katrin has a PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University and now does computational neuroscience/ethology research. She received her training in computational neuroscience during her tenure as a Sloan-Swartz Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco.

Her research is focused on understanding the underlying dynamics of animal behavior and how knowledge of these dynamics can inform us about the effects of disease processes and environmental and/or genetic perturbations. Her research makes use of real behavioral data taken by collaborators in the fields of psychiatry, physiology, neurology, neuroscience and medicine and her main plans involve long term collaborations with experimentalists in the fields of geriatrics, psychiatry, and physiology.

She came to Randolph College because she is passionate about involving undergraduates in original research and because Randolph College’s high faculty to student ratio, flexible administration, and committed science faculty make it an ideal environment for fostering collaborations with undergraduates.