Abstract: In 2019, the physics department at UT Austin learned that women undergraduates were leaving the physics major at roughly twice the rate of men leaving the major. Through interviews with current and former students we learned that this was largely the result of negative peer interactions (including sexual harassment) in settings where faculty and graduate students were not present. Although I do not have data to support this, I suspect that students other than women are probably also discouraged and feel alienated from the physics major as a result of negative peer interactions as well. Under support of a Provost's Teaching Fellowship, I worked to grow a supportive community for physics undergraduates and to teach the undergraduates the cognitive tools and responses to shape their environment positively and to respond constructively to difficult situations. "Difficult situations" includes bias incidents such as those reported by undergraduate women, but it also includes the intrinsic academic difficulty of physics as a discipline. For this, I developed and taught, for five years, a seminar class to address many of the non-academic things that are important for success and happiness in physics.  More information is available here: https://ctl.utexas.edu/grants-fellowships/provosts-teaching-fellows/initiatives/being-human-physics.  I will discuss my experience in teaching this class in an evolving climate and what I learned by doing so over the years.  Measuring the impact of something like this class is not as clear-cut as "normal" physics measurements, but I will present what I have gathered from talking with students and faculty about how this class has improved the undergraduate student experience.

Bio: Vernita Gordon is a Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, associated with the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, and the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease. Prof. Gordon received her BSc in Physics and her PhD from Harvard University in 2003. She went on to do postdocs at University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, including as a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, before joining the faculty at UT Austin 2010. There she has built a very successful experimental biophysics group focused on how cells interact with each other and with their environment, with a special focus on biofilms including their mechanical properties and immune system effects. Among other honors, Dr. Gordon was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2023. Dr. Gordon also holds Trull Centennial Professorship and Elizabeth B. Gleeson Professorship fellowships. In addition, Dr. Gordon has received several teaching awards and was previously a Provost’s Teaching Fellow.