Brian Anderson earned his BS and MS degrees in Physics at BYU and his PhD in acoustices at The Pennsylvania State University. He was a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory for two years and then a visiting professor at BYU for three years. He returned to Los Alamos full time for four years before being coming to BYU as an assistant professor in 2015.
Dr. Anderson has received a Department of Energy Early Career Award, a Fulbright Fellow Award, and is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. His 35 papers written with student co-authors, including 14 by undergraduate first authors, are his most meaningful accomplishment because of the student development it represents.
Brother Anderson’s research focuses on the use of the time reversal acoustics technique and it’s applications. Time reversal is a method uses to concentrate focused sound or vibration to a location in space. Recently we have studied the focusing of very loud sounds (200 dB!) and the strange things that happen at these high sound levels and on using soda pop cans as resonators to concentrate the focused waves even better than without the resonators present. We mostly setup custom experiments and take data but we also have some theoretical and modeling approaches to these problems that we work on as well. At any given time, my research group includes about 2 grad students and 6 undergraduate students.
I try to work with any student interested in working with me. Students often have vague ideas for research experiences they want to pursue so I listen to what interests them and try to find research that matches their interests and aligns with my research goals. Our department requires all of our majors to do research towards a senior thesis or capstone report.
I have found through experience that almost any research project can be fun and interesting once you get into the thick of it. It’s important for students to realize this. Often in life you get to pick the general area of work you pursue but not always the specifics and that’s ok. I try to have ideas ready for different aspects of my research goals to be pursued so that I can offer these as options to the students. I encourage them to pursue their own ideas as they develop them and even some side Projects.
We meet weekly to plan, learn, and study results together. Sometimes my research students and I meet as a group (during summers or before conferences) for additional training and allow the students to present in a casual setting and talk openly about the research challenges they are facing. After some time, students write up their work as a thesis that is also used as a manuscript to submit as a journal article.
Weekly meetings one-on-one with research students are opportunities to talk more than just about research. We talk about coursework, life goals, and future education opportunities. Gospel insights regularly come up naturally as we share things going on in our lives. Weekly one-on-one meetings really help the student and I to get to know each other and allow the free sharing of ideas and for us both to openly discuss what we don’t understand. These meetings (often an hour long and with 6-12 students any given week) take a lot of time but I feel they are key to ministering to the one.