William F. McConville, Jr.

William F. McConville, Jr., PhD

  • Assistant Teaching Professor
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Affiliated Programs

Education

  • PhD, Physics (2014)
    University of Maryland - College Park (MD)
  • BS, Physics (2007)
    Pennsylvania State University - University Park (PA)

About Me

I received my bachelors degree in physics with distinction and honors at Pennsylvania State University where I gained early research experience as an undergraduate in condensed matter physics, specifically with regard to artificial magnetic spin ice materials, where I co-authored a paper entitled "Artificial 'Spin Ice' in a Geometrically Frustrated Lattice of Nanoscale Ferromagnetic Islands," which was featured on the cover of the January 2006 issue of Nature, which I designed myself.

I later attended University of Maryland, College Park for my graduate work in high energy astrophysics, during which time I was a member of the Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where I studied gamma-ray loud non-blazar active galactic nuclei, with a specific focus on high energy emission at kiloparsec-scale distances from the black hole central engine, which was a primary topic in my dissertation entitled "Investigating the Origin of Gamma-Ray Emission in Non-Blazer Sources with the Fermi Large Area Telescope".

My current research includes theoretical studies of boundary value solutions for spacetime fields using complex-valued four vector analysis of non-diagonalized Hermitian metric tensors, as well as to investigate the local and non-local behavior of objects in motion under such conventions.

Publications

  • McConville, W. et al. "Fermi Large Area Telescope Observations of the Active Galaxy 4C +55.17: Steady, Hard Gamma-Ray Emission and its Implications" The Astrophysical Journal (Sep 2011): 738, 148.
  • Abdo, A.A. et al. (The Fermi LAT Collaboration) "Fermi Large Area Telescope Detection of the Radio Galaxy M87" The Astrophysical Journal (Dec 2009): 707, 55.
  • Wang, R.F. et al. "Artificial 'Spin Ice' in a Geometrically Frustrated Lattice of Nanoscale Ferromagnetic Islands" Nature (Jan 2006): 439, 303.