We sat down with Christian Solorio, PhD, full-time Evaluator, to chat about his journey through physics education research to his current role with Brockport Research Institute.

Tell us about yourself and your current role with BRI.

Solorio: At BRI, I am an evaluator now. I was doing contract-based evaluations for about two years, and now I am full time and very excited to be working on a variety of different programs.

Walk us through your background and how you got involved with BRI!

Solorio: My background is in physics. I got into education from that because I didn’t have a great high school teacher in physics, so I gave it another shot in college. I really liked the community there and got looped into some informal education in undergrad doing a Science Saturday for middle schoolers. It’s where I found that “hey, I really like getting people excited about science.” I was also doing research at the time in computational cosmology, so when I was graduating from undergrad, I was trying to figure out, like, “well, I like this teaching stuff, but I like the research that I do. What direction do I go?”

Then I learned about physics education research, which is studying how students understand and learn physics and how we teach physics. I applied to graduate schools in that subject field, got into Oregon State, moved all the way over to the West Coast, and did a PhD in Physics Education Research looking at how students understand quantum mechanics. I really enjoyed that work and got to learn a whole bunch about how students learn- not just in physics, but in STEM in general.

After that, I went to a post-doctoral fellowship at Rochester Institute of Technology. In that post-doc, I was studying professional development with emerging discipline-based researchers- people like me who were doing physics education research, or biology, or chemistry education research, doing some professional development research on that population. Part of my post-doc involved programmatic support of professional development for an emerging education researchers program, so that kind of brought me into the world of programs.

I heard about Brockport Research Institute, saw that they needed some local evaluators at the time, and figured, hey, it sounds interesting to me. I really like that I get to use research methods but apply it to a more local scale. The work that I do is being read by these program directors and they get to make some informed changes to their programs to continuously improve it, so it was this nice marriage of practicality and my previously developed research skills.

Thanks so much for sharing your story! To close out, what are some fun facts that others might not know about you?

Solorio: I love my pets. I have three cats- Velma, Remy, and Linguini. I also recently adopted a dog named Pumpkin, so they keep me pretty busy. I also really enjoy photography. I love taking photos when I travel as well.