John P. Graham Teaching Professor of Physics
Areas of Expertise: Nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, machine learning, nonlinear time series analysis
The current appointee of the John P. Graham Teaching Professorship, Dr. Christopher Kulp has an M.S. and Ph.D. from the College of William & Mary, and a B.A. from McDaniel College. He joined the faculty of Lycoming College in 2008, and is now a Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Physics, where he teaches data analysis, machine learning, data science, and physics at all levels. Dr. Kulp maintains an active undergraduate research group in the field of complex systems. He has 30 publications including articles in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and conference papers. He has worked with data from a large variety of fields including astrophysics, climatology, medicine, economics, biology and combustion.
Kulp has co-authored two physics textbooks: Classical Mechanics, A computational approach, and Mathematical Methods using Python. Both books focus on using the programming language Python to mathematically model physical systems and solve problems in physics.
In addition to his academic writings, Kulp is also a science fiction author. In 2022, he who won the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author for his story titled, “What Would You Pay for a Second Chance?” The story was published in the November 2022 issue of Galaxy’s Edge magazine. He has also published three novels and a novella.
Before coming to Lycoming, Kulp taught at McDaniel College, The College of William & Mary and Eastern Kentucky University. In addition, he taught high school earth science and physics as well as a brief stint at a summer program as a kindergarten and first grade math teacher. In his spare time, Kulp enjoys reading and playing guitar.
Selected Publications
C. W. Kulp and V. Pagonis, Classical Mechanics: A Computational Approach, CRC Press (2020).
C. W. Kulp, M. Kurtz, C. Hunt, and M. Velardi, The distribution of wealth: an agent-based approach to examine the effect of estate taxation, skill inheritance, and the Carnegie Effect, Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination 17, 4, (2022).
2019 C. W. Kulp, M. Kurtz, N. Wilston, and L. Quigley, The effect of various tax and redistribution models on the Gini coefficient of simple exchange games, Chaos 29, 083118 (2019).