Image by Walt Moore from 1986, when I graduated from high school

Here's a real picture.

Dr. Doug Ingram

I'm an Instructor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. I currently teach a variety of classes, including introductory Astronomy and Physics classes, and I maintain an archive of educational resources for undergraduate education in these fields.

I was born May 27, 1968. I grew up in Denton, Texas and went to high school there (class of 1986). I did my undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin before moving to Seattle, Washington in 1990. I got my PhD from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington in August 1996 and have been teaching at TCU ever since.

My career is devoted to science education and to Astronomy, and I'm always striving to be a better teacher. I'm also hopelessly addicted to anything with an internet connection. In the past, I used to write a lot of book reviews, but now I'm lucky if I can just keep my own educational sites up to date. Outside the net, I still do a lot of reading, and I spend a lot of time with my family, which includes my wife, Michelle, our five kids (28, 25, 21, 15 and 12), and our three pugs. Everyone in our family is an avid Pokemon Go player. I hit level 40 around March 2017 and still play actively (I expect to have caught 100,000 pokemon by the end of 2018). Michelle and the kids are all somewhere in the 30's level-wise. It's a fun thing we do together as a family.

I'm a big baseball fan (mainly rooting for the Seattle Mariners and Texas Rangers), but I also grew up watching the Dallas Cowboys and so am a hopeless football fan as well. In my grad school days, I played a lot of Ultimate Frisbee, but these days, my frisbee-related activities are pretty much limited to the occasional round of disk golf. My musical tastes are almost strictly limited to the 80's (my iTunes is loaded with Phil Collins, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Billy Joel, Sting, etc), but I also occasionally listen to the great a capella group known as "The Nylons", and I'm a big soundtrack fan (The Breakfast Club, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, To Live and Die in LA, etc.).

If you really want to see what makes me tick, you must have QUITE a bit of time on your hands. If that's the case, have I got a site for you. Go check out your Personality Type by taking the Keirsey-Bates Temperament Sorter test. I fit the INFJ personality pretty well, I think.

Politically, I would've been called a moderate back during the 90's, but that apparently makes me a flaming liberal now on most issues. I can't imagine having the integrity and ethics required of a scientist while at the same time supporting the calculated, cynical dishonesty that permeates the people who purport to speak for and represent the Republican party (not to mention the corporate media) and the madness that passes for "conservative" governing philosophy these days at every level.

If that offends you, good. Maybe it will motivate you to go out, get politically educated/active and see if you can change my mind. Or change yours. Or maybe you'll just cancel out my vote in the next election.

Oh, hey, I'm on Facebook, too.

Contact me at d.ingram@tcu.edu

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