Live from Faraday’s Lab!: An Intuitive and Historical Perspective on Electromagnetism

Live from Faraday’s Lab!: An Intuitive and Historical Perspective on Electromagnetism

Prof. David Ricketts
North Carolina State University, NC, USA

Abstract: This webinar will be broadcast directly from Michael Faraday’s at the Royal Institution in London. This is the laboratory where Faraday invented the first electric motor, the first electric generator, the faraday cage, Faraday’s law of induction and his magnetic lines of force, which led (in part) Maxwell to his famous equations. Dr. Ricketts will recreate Faraday’s original experiments to not only share the history, but also the natural intuition that Faraday had, and most importantly, how you can use the Faraday approach to better understand the dynamics and effects of electromagnetism yourself. In the spirit of Faraday, this lecture will have no equations, no slides, only a close view on the experiments and understanding that changed our world. Through the lecture, you will also learn how to re-create many of the experiments, including how to make a Faraday motor at home! Join Dr. Ricketts and Michael Faraday (in spirit) at the place where it all began, the Royal Institution, for this special IEEE MTT webinar.

Speaker’s Bio: David S. Ricketts received the PhD in Electrical Engineering from Harvard. He is currently a Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University. Prior to moving to academic he spent more than 8 years in industrial R&D in the development of integrated circuits in mixed-signal, RF and power management applications. Prof. Ricketts’ research crosses the fields of physics, material science and circuit design, investigating the ultimate capabilities of microelectronic devices and how these are harnessed by differing circuit topologies to produce the highest performing systems. His work has appeared in Nature and in numerous IEEE conferences and journals and was selected for the 2008 McGraw Hill Yearbook of Science and Engineering. He is the author of the two books: The Designer’s Guide to Jitter in Ring Oscillators and Electrical Solitons. He is a Track Editor for the Transactions on Microwave Theory and Technique, a Topic Editor for the IEEE Journal of Microwaves and past Chair of the MTT Technical Committee 9 on Microwave Devices. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award and the George Tallman Ladd research award. In addition as an educator he is the recipient of the 2009 Wimmer Faculty Teaching Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, 2013 Harvard University Bok Center Teaching Award and the 2021 William F. Lane Outstanding Teaching award at NCSU. Since 2015, Prof. Ricketts has taught experiential hand-on workshops on building a QAM Radio and a FMCW RADAR across the globe at all of the major microwave conferences.