Physics: Barbara Breen, Ph.D.

Title: Assistant Professor, Physics
Phone: 503-943-7263
Email:breen@up.edu
Office: Buckley Center 282

About the Professor: 

Barbara Breen followed a non-traditional path on her way to joining  the University of Portland's Department of Physics in the fall of 2006 as the Clare Boothe Luce professor. After working in construction as a union carpenter and going to school part-time at night, she became a neuromuscular therapist specializing in injury rehabilitation and chronic pain relief. Continuing her education, she earned her B.S. in physics from Georgia Tech in 1997. Her Ph.D. in physics six years later featured a minor in neuroscience, and she completed her thesis research in the Georgia Tech/Emory University Wallace A. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. She received an NIH-sponsored fellowship in neuroscience in 2004 and worked for two years as a post-doctoral researcher with the Shawn Hochman group at Emory School of Medicine.

Her research interests are computational nonlinear dynamics and biophysics. Dr. Breen models these systems on the University of Portland's 32-processor 73.6 GHz Apple Workgroup parallel computing cluster.

Education:

• B.S., Georgia Institute of Technology, 1997
• Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003
• At Portland, 2006—
  

Research Interests:

• Biophysics
• Neuroscience
• Computational nonlinear dynamical systems