Dr. Sally Laurent-Muehleisen

2022: Emeritus Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology

After graduating from UW-Madison, I attended Penn State where I received my PhD in Astrophysics in 1996. After that, I did a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California and then spent 16 years in the Physics Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, starting as an adjunct and eventually becoming a Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair and the program director for the Astrophysics program I created there after which I retired in August of 2022 and was given Emeritus Professor of Instruction. Through it all, my major in Math has served me well. I may not have to remember a lot from my Abstract Algebra class (which is too bad because I loved it), but calculus, Diff Eqs, Linear Algebra and even my non-Euclidean geometry course have been very useful in shaping how I teach my students.

I started a new degree program at Illinois Tech in Astrophysics and was the sole faculty in it, teaching all the classes for majors for many years in addition to introductory physics courses (both calc-based and algebra-based). I was Associate Chair for the Physics department for a few years and recently retired and was – I do believe – the first ever faculty on a teaching – rather than research tract – to have been awarded Emeritus status from the University.