Biography

My name is Jonathan Preston. I am a second degree physics student at the City College of New York. I began studying physics in 2011 after taking a late life interest in the subject thanks to Brian Greene's book The Fabric of the Cosmos. The author's very general descriptions of physics led me to finally view the subject as something more interesting than adding arrows together and it has been my full time hobby since enrolling in my first physics class last spring.

As a second degree student, I have focused on core physics courses in order to gain a foundation as quickly as possible. This crash course was comprised of two electricity and magnetism classes, classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, and quantum mechanics. This year I received the Dr. Sidney Millman Scholarship, awarded to one junior physics major by the department, and was recently given permission to enroll in the first semester masters level physics courses which I will begin this fall.

I came to the Laser Teaching Center at Stony Brook University to gain hands-on experience with some of the most useful tools in physics under the guidance of Dr. John Noe. My interests here have fallen on topics that relate to the familiar subject of electricity and magnetism. I hope to follow in the footsteps of previous students who explored the properties of optical vortices, beams that carry points of zero intensity and non-zero orbital angular momentum.