When Farmingdale State College’s (FSC) Edmund “Ned” Douglass was about 14 years old, he and his father would go on walks behind their Maryland home and explore the night sky. Douglass admitted that while he “felt cold” from both the evening air and the incalculability of the universe, he was drawn in.
“It did give me a bit of an empty feeling and a sort of chill, looking at pictures of galaxies and stars and the vastness of space,” he said. “And my dad would take me out back in the field with binoculars and point out different stars, and star clusters, and constellations. There was an interest in getting a sense for our place situated within this vast cosmos.”
After high school, Douglass went on to study physics at the University of Pittsburgh, until a six-hour Greyhound bus ride his freshman year changed his course.
“It gave me a lot of time to read whenever I was traveling home,” he said. “And one weekend I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which is a description of fundamental physics and the origin of the universe and how we’ve come to understand the most basic components that shape the grandest scales of existence. And that—that blew my mind. That changed my direction. That weekend, I went back and I changed my major to add astronomy.”
After college, Douglass went straight into a PhD program, and in 2012, received a doctoral degree in astronomy from Boston University, where he studied clusters of galaxies, the largest gravitationally bound systems in the universe. The day after completing his dissertation, he was on a plane to Egypt to begin a teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had just stepped down from power, and Douglass’ courses in physics theory and “applying scientific reasoning to everyday life” were partially eclipsed by the city’s political turmoil and civil unrest.
“It was exciting being there and teaching scientific thinking and how to address problem solving,” he said. “There was a lot of political rhetoric that was flying around, a lot of propaganda. And this class was, in a way, how to sift through all of that, to really understand what’s going on. You know, not to be hoodwinked, not to be misled. That’s what we were aiming to do, trying to provide some reliable process within a time of tumult.
“I think science and scientific thinking is always something that you can fall back on,” he added.
In 2014, he joined the physics faculty at FSC and in 2017 became chair of its Science, Technology, & Society (STS) Department. “Dr. Douglass has reimagined and redesigned the STS program during his time as chair of the department,” said Thomas Ward, PhD, dean of FSC’s School of Arts & Sciences. “He has led Farmingdale’s largest major through changes in curricular offerings and the hiring of the first full-time faculty in the program’s history. Our students have benefited tremendously from his skilled leadership and academic expertise.”
“FSC’s new STS curriculum is built around scientific thinking and the development of a problem-solving tool kit,” said Douglass. “Whether you are in a laboratory, in the midst of a revolution, or working through more mundane, unstructured problems encountered on the job, it is extremely useful to be able to approach such challenges from a scientific perspective, with a time-tested method for the acquisition of reliable information.”
Douglass also enjoys sharing his enthusiasm for research with his students and is passionate about teaching them to “contextualize their existence in this grander scheme.”
“I want students coming out of my classes feeling something bigger or feeling that they’re part of the consequence of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. And we’re not just hidden in some corner of the universe, but we are the universe thinking, and feeling, and experiencing itself,” he said.
“Putting yourself in that frame of reference can help to allow yourself to step back from smaller things that can bring you down,” he added. “Once you have that, it can be applied everywhere outside of a physics classroom.”
