Bill Ashmanskas

As a Senior Lecturer, I teach and develop undergraduate physics courses here at Penn.  I also work on readout electronics, instrumentation, and data acquisition for High Energy Physics and for Positron Emission Tomography.  I work as a member of the Physics department’s HEP Instrumentation Group and of the Radiology department’s Physics and Instrumentation Group.

Education
  • Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley (1998)
  • A.B., Harvard University (1992)

Honors:

  • Provost's Award for Teaching Excellence by Non-Standing Faculty (2020)
  • College Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty (2019)
  • Excellence in Teaching Award, Penn undergraduate Architecture program (2014)
  • Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2005)
  • Arthur Holly Compton Fellowship, Argonne National Laboratory (2003)
  • Enrico Fermi Fellowship, University of Chicago (1998)
  • U.C. Berkeley Physics, Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (1993)

 

Research Interests

Instrumentation and readout electronics, FPGA-based digital electronics, Positron Emission Tomography, and High Energy Physics

Courses Taught

Physics 008 (Physics for Architects I)

Physics 009 (Physics for Architects II)

Physics 351 (Analytical Mechanics)

Physics 364 (Laboratory Electronics)

Physics 414 (Laboratory in Modern Physics)

Selected Publications
  • Book review:  Learning the Art of Electronics: A Hands-on Lab Course.  (Textbook by Tom Hayes and Paul Horowitz.)  Am. J. Phys. 85 (2017) 78.
  • Waveform-Sampling Electronics for the LaPET Whole-Body Time-of-Flight PET Scanner.  (With Joel Karp et al.)  IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 61 (2014) 1174.
  • The CDF Silicon Vertex Trigger.  (CDF collaboration.)  Nucl. Inst. Meth. A518 (2004) 532.
  • Search for the FCNC Decay D0 to mu+ mu-.  (CDF collaboration.)  Phys. Rev. D68 (2003) 091101.
  • Direct Measurement of the W Boson Width.  (CDF collaboration.)  Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 (2000) 3347.