Noah Finkelstein

Noah Finkelstein honored as CU Distinguished Professor

Kirsten Apodaca — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:14:17 +0000

Noah Finkelstein honored as CU Distinguished Professor Kirsten Apodaca Mon, 04/13/2026 - 17:14

Kirsten Apodaca

Noah Finkelstein has been named a Distinguished Professor, CU’s highest honor for faculty across the four-campus system.

At the University of Colorado Board of Regents meeting on Feb. 6, Finkelstein was recognized for the distinction along with five other faculty.

“I am so honored and grateful to be included among these remarkable folks who are transforming lives, disciplines, and building a better tomorrow through scholarship and action,” said Finkelstein during the regents meeting.

The award recognizes tenured faculty members who demonstrate exemplary performance in research or creative work; a record of excellence in promoting learning and student attainment of knowledge and skills; and outstanding service to the profession, the university and its affiliates. Since its inception in 1977, the honor has been awarded to 160 faculty system wide.

Finkelstein is the fourth professor from the Department of Physics to earn the rank, joining Andreas Becker, Margaret Murnane, and Carl Wieman.

"Noah's selection as a Distinguished Professor recognizes his excellence in teaching, his important research on improving physics education, and his dedicated service at CU and beyond,” says Tobin Munsat, chair and professor of physics. “Our department now celebrates four Distinguished Professors, which speaks to the quality and excellence of our faculty.”

Advancing physics education research and beyond

When Finkelstein joined the �鶹��Ƶ faculty in 2003, physics education research was still emerging as a field. As �鶹��Ƶ’s first full-time faculty member focused on physics education research, Finkelstein co-founded CU’s physics education research group alongside Professors Carl Wieman and Steven Pollock.

For more than two decades, Finkelstein has helped shape and advance the field by incorporating scholarly traditions from physics, educational psychology, and education. His research blends theory, experiments, and studies of student learning with curricular approaches to build more effective and inclusive environments. He leads research in how students learn, how courses are taught, and how these transformations can be scaled across institutions.

“His visionary work has transformed not just how we teach physics, but how we understand and improve STEM education worldwide,” said Chancellor Justin Schwartz at the regents meeting.

At CU, Finkelstein helped develop the Learning Assistant program, which has now been implemented at over 120 colleges and universities worldwide.

A national leader in the field, Finkelstein’s scholarly impact includes more than 180 reviewed publications, 79 journal publications, 19 chapters, 88 conference proceedings, two books, and more than 15,000 citations.

Throughout his career, Finkelstein has received a multitude of teaching awards including the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award, the Gold Pin Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Sigma Pi Sigma Outstanding Physics Professor of the Year. In 2012, the University of Colorado named Finkelstein a Presidential Teaching Scholar, and he was the inaugural Timmerhaus Teaching Ambassador, an honor designed to promote the value of education outside the university system.

Extending his impact beyond physics, Finkelstein contributes to national policy and educational reform by advising the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. He also serves on the National Academies Board on Science Education and is a trustee of the Higher Learning Commission.

University of Colorado Anschutz Chancellor Don Elliman, who has served on the board of Higher Learning Commission for the last 12 years alongside Finkelstein, highlighted his influence during the regents meeting. Elliman said Finkelstein’s input “has had a far-reaching effect, beyond the traditional teaching environment in the halls of the University of Colorado.”

Collectively, Finkelstein’s research, teaching and national leadership reflect a career guided by impact on students, institutions, STEM education and policy. His recognition as a Distinguished Professor emphasizes both his lasting contributions to the University of Colorado and his continued positive influence on education.

“I’m so grateful to work in an institution that not only allows for but fosters the vision of a better tomorrow,” Finkelstein added.

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�鶹��Ƶ Physics Professor Noah Finkelstein Partners with �鶹��Ƶ History Professor Phoebe Young to Study the Importance of Belonging at Universities

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 19:09:16 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ Physics Professor Noah Finkelstein Partners with �鶹��Ƶ History Professor Phoebe Young to Study the Importance of Belonging at Universities Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 13:09

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry

In the current landscape of higher education, familiar challenges like disengaged students, faculty burnout, and high staff turnover can frequently dominate discussions. Often seen as separate issues, these challenges can be viewed through a systems perspective to reveal deeper, interconnected roots—chief among them a pervasive lack of belonging across all levels of academia. The recent COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have exacerbated these issues, leaving many students, staff, and faculty feeling isolated and overwhelmed.

To address these issues and suggest a possible solution, University of Colorado Boulder Professor of Physics Noah Finkelstein collaborated with �鶹��Ƶ Professor of History Phoebe Young to highlight the importance of belonging, or a sense of community, at institutes of higher learning in a recently published article for the journal Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. From their work, they found that belonging is important on multiple levels, from students to faculty and staff to the institution itself, and that each of these levels can help support each other.

“One of the key takeaways is that each level impacts the other levels and is impacted by the other levels,” Finkelstein explained. “So students, faculty, and institutions both benefit from a sense of belonging and are agents of belonging for these other layers.”

A Background in Belonging

For years, Finkelstein and Young have studied the importance of belonging within separate institutional layers.

In addition to conducting studies that identify a sense of belonging as essential for student engagement and retention in physics classes, Finkelstein notes that, as a professor, he got a front-row seat to seeing how belonging impacted students. Given his role, he observed how students helped foster belonging not only for other students but also for faculty.

Additionally, Finkelstein studies the role of belonging at an institutional level, both in his research on institutional change and as he sits on the board of trustees for the Higher Learning Commission. From his position, he looks at how institutions are organized and the policies they implement to cultivate a community and sense of belonging among individuals.

Young elaborated, “I've done less formal research on faculty and staff belonging than Noah has done on either students or institutions.” As Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, however, she led and published efforts within her department (the History Teaching and Learning Project and the Teaching Quality Initiative), which demonstrated the significance of faculty sense of belonging.

“We got together and said, ‘Hey, why not combine forces on this,’ and then we can highlight the systems view with multiple layers,” Finkelstein added.

Belonging is Multi-Layered

Unlike previous literature, which has largely examined each layer individually, Finkelstein and Young adopted a systems view to explore the concept of belonging at its three essential layers: student, faculty and staff, and institutional. This multi-layered approach involved analyzing existing literature and case studies to understand how belonging impacts each group and their interdependencies.

“You can't look at any one of these groups in isolation, right?” Young said. “We have to think about how they relate to each other.”

The researchers examined students' academic and social belonging, highlighting the importance of feeling connected to their field of study and peers. They also looked at how institutional support and recognition influence faculty and staff's ability to foster student belonging. Lastly, Finkelstein and Young considered how institutions themselves need to be viewed as integral parts of society to foster a collective sense of belonging.

The researchers saw that a strong sense of belonging is correlated with higher retention rates, increased engagement, and better academic performance for students. They found that, notably, belonging has a more substantial impact on retention for women in fields like physics than traditional metrics like exam scores.

For faculty and staff, Young and Finkelstein saw that belonging enhances their capacity to support students and contributes to institutional loyalty and reduced turnover.

At the institutional level, not only does the institute construct conditions for students and faculty belonging within college campuses, but also, increasingly, institutions for higher education need to make the case that they belong and contribute to our broader society.

Belonging During the COVID-19 Pandemic

For Young, the faculty and staff's sense of belonging was especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We noticed the importance of belonging more clearly when it got stressed and taken away during the pandemic. This was because of the way faculty were being so front and center and staff too on many occasions for trying to hold on to some kind of tenuous sense of student belonging. For them, they had fewer tools to do so than they would have normally had.”

Finkelstein and Young found the pandemic revealed that a strong sense of belonging among faculty and staff is essential for their well-being and their capacity to support students effectively. This period underscored the interdependence of belonging across different levels within academia: diminished belonging among faculty and staff led to decreased student engagement, highlighting the need for systemic approaches to foster a supportive environment for all.

Belonging Beyond the Simple Fix

Given their observations, Young and Finkelstein suggest that moving forward, higher education institutes need to adopt this systems-wide thinking to ensure sustainable belonging within and beyond an institution.

“We often see belonging in the literature that belonging does matter, but there's often a kind of list, such as ‘the top 10 things you can do to increase student belonging.’” Young stated. “So it becomes a kind of plug-and-play or one-off solution. So the institutions then say: ‘Oh, we'll pick this one. We'll do that, and things will be better.’”

Instead, Finkelstein and Young suggest that shifting to a systems-wide view can help integrate belonging into an institutional framework more sustainably. This perspective requires rethinking institutional policies and practices to foster an environment where students, faculty, and staff all feel valued and supported. For institutions, this means not only addressing internal culture and policies but also how they are perceived externally. By positioning themselves as integral parts of the broader social fabric, institutions can garner public support and fulfill their mission to serve the public good more effectively.

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Striving to help women feel they belong in physics

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 22:10:19 +0000

Striving to help women feel they belong in physics Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/28/2017 - 16:10

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