For Reinhard Schumacher, Retirement Expands Opportunities for Research

Reinhard Schumacher may have retired from teaching, but he will continue to be a presence in the Department of Physics.

"I'm fully retired, but I'm not stopping working," Schumacher said. "I need a bit more time to finish several projects before slowing down. I'm continuing to work on research that's fully funded, but I did stop teaching. It puts me a position to spend all day, every day, on my research."

Schumacher started teaching at Carnegie Mellon in 1987 and has taught continuously for 36 years. A native Canadian, he went to Churchill Area High School in a suburb of Pittsburgh.

"The fact that I ended up coming back to Pittsburgh was a little bit of fate," he said.

For more than two decades, Schumacher taught the Modern Physics Laboratory, a capstone course for all undergraduate physics majors with an emphasis on writing scientific papers, learning how to deliver persuasive research presentations and to think like a physicist, a skill that is valuable for many career paths.

"It was a real pleasure to be able to do that," Schumacher said. "I spent a lot of time improving the experience for students and making it better and better as the years went by. It's really wonderful to see the lightbulb go on over their heads when they suddenly understand a concept."

Schumacher also taught Modern Essentials (Relativity and Quantum Physics) for many years.

For his excellence in undergraduate teaching, Schumacher received the Julius Ashkin Award of the Mellon College of Science in 1995.

"Lab courses are one of the only places where students really have to grapple with data in the sense that you acquire these numbers and you're trying to prove something or test an equation," he said. "It's one of the only courses where you get thorough training in that. Understanding how to crunch numbers in a way that is correct and reliable is useful for whatever career a student pursues."

Physics lent itself to Schumacher's early interests in designing and building equipment.

"When I studied physics as an undergraduate, I came to realize that the discipline gives someone with those interests a playground to explore, both in terms of physics ideas and also the opportunity to design and build experiments," he said. "I've been lucky to make a career out of something I've really enjoyed since early on."

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Schumacher worked at CERN in Switzerland for several years and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research, now known as the Paul Scherrer Institute. He earned his bachelor's degree from Case Western Reserve University and graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with his Ph.D. in 1983.

When he arrived at Carnegie Mellon, some of his MIT classmates became colleagues, such as Emeritus Professors of Physics Gregg Franklin and Brian Quinn. Along with Curtis Meyer, the Otto Stern Professor of Physics and interim dean of the Mellon College of Science, the four were the core of the experimental nuclear physics group from the late '80s through the 2010s.

They conducted experiments at CERN, Brookhaven National Lab in New York and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia.

Schumacher studies the electromagnetic production of strange particles known as kaons and hyperons. The production of strange-quark pairs is helping to refine understanding of baryon and mesonic resonances. He served as the spokesperson for the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) large acceptance spectrometer (CLAS) experiment. He also is part of the upgraded CEBAF known as the Gluonic Excitation Experiment (GlueX) and stepped down as head of its collaboration board in early 2022.

"We've been doing lots of different things at Jefferson Lab. Carnegie Mellon is ideally situated. We have good lab infrastructure, good resources from funding agencies and we've been able to make that work for a long time," he said. For his research, Schumacher was named an American Physical Society Fellow in 2014.

At Carnegie Mellon, along with collaborating with physicists, Schumacher works with researchers in the Department of Psychology. Robert Mason, senior research associate, and Marcel Just, the D.O. Hebb University Professor of Psychology, and Schumacher are investigating how human brains encode scientific concepts with the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In one study, the researchers compared brains of Ph.D. physicists to students entering the field to compare their cognitive foundations and development during learning.

"We have funding to study similar questions across all of the STEM disciplines in the Mellon College of Science," he said. The researchers are looking at how students in physics, mathematical sciences, chemistry and biological sciences encode advanced concepts in their brain, and where there are similarities to how the brain organizes and stores different disciplines.

"This cross-disciplinary work arises from the happy coincidence that we have people like me who are interested in the science side and people like Marcel and Rob who are interested from the psychology side," he said. "And we're just about a stone's throw apart making it easy to get together and meet."