Angela Biselli: The Things That Matter—It's About More than Teaching and Research

To Angela Biselli, the heart of being a professor isn’t teaching or research, although those are two elements she’s passionate about. Instead, she finds the deepest meaning in engaging with students and cultivating a supportive culture.

It’s about “the life of the students and organizing activities for them,” she says. “Being on top of what they do, knowing their names. If they’re struggling, calling them into the office and saying, ‘What’s going on?’”

Biselli is a physics professor at Fairfield University, a liberal arts school in Connecticut. After earning a PhD in nuclear and particle physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon, she had hoped for exactly this kind of position. “The university was love at first sight,” she says. She craved teaching, and Fairfield offered a student-focused environment where she could teach while diving deeper into the structure of protons and neutrons.

Last spring, during her 19th year at Fairfield, Biselli’s colleagues honored her with a Sigma Pi Sigma Outstanding Service Award. They recognized her for numerous contributions to physics and the department, highlighting, in particular, her mentoring of faculty and staff. That’s not something Biselli was asked to do—she simply recognized a need and started addressing it.

Being a new hire is challenging, she says. When subjects like how to be successful in teaching, tenure, and other aspects of the job aren’t openly discussed, it gets even harder. That’s why she’s intentional about mentoring, building community, and maintaining open lines of communication among the faculty and staff—literal open lines, via the communication platform Slack. Biselli even strategizes how to integrate new hires into the academic and social life of the department and university so they aren’t isolated.

One of her ongoing goals is to normalize open doors in the department. “Our students are entitled to find us, even if it’s not our office hours. And I think your colleagues are entitled to find you, even if it’s not your office hours,” she says. If you aren’t part of the department community, “you miss out on what the university is about.”

She’s also relentlessly petitioned for more tenure-track positions in the department—at a time when many rely heavily on adjuncts and visiting professors—primarily to increase research opportunities for students. “For us, research is one of the biggest retention tools for physics majors,” Biselli says. “If we get them to do research by the end of their freshman year, they will never leave the major.”

Research is one reason Biselli is where she is today. She grew up in Italy, where a great high school physics teacher inspired her to get a bachelor’s degree in the subject. Before graduating from the University of Genoa, she came to the newly created Jefferson Lab (JLab) in Virginia to do research for her thesis. That led her to graduate school at RPI, where she continued working with JLab. She still does research there today and often mentors research students.

Teaching is one of Biselli’s favorite activities. Modern and computational physics are fun to teach to upper-level students, she says, and introductory physics is great because she gets to meet students during their first year of college. In that class, she also gets to use examples related to one of her favorite activities—riding roller coasters. (Her favorite is the Millennium Force at Cedar Point. This summer she crossed the world’s longest coaster off her list, Steel Dragon 2000 in Japan.)

“My advice to students is to do what you like,” she says. As physics department chair several years ago, Biselli instituted concentrations to give students more options. They can now follow a general physics track, education track, or health studies track through the major. It’s important for faculty to keep an eye on their majors, how they feel, and what they want to do, she says. That way, faculty can help students reach their goals.

The year before the COVID-19 pandemic, Fairfield graduated a record nine physics majors. Biselli credits this to the increasingly supportive department culture, research opportunities, and community-building events for students. Physics is a demanding major, and helping the majors connect early builds a sense of belonging and camaraderie that can help students as they pursue the degree, she says. “All these things matter.”