Tatem Research Institute Mission:
Our mission is to support transdisciplinary research and higher education that includes the Philosophical Foundations of Physics, with efforts to increase the participation of historically excluded peoples, particularly in Hawaiʻi.
We are an organization dedicated to social justice and systemic change in academia so that the diversity of humanity can genuinely contribute to the field of physics.
Activities:
Research
Higher Education
Outreach
Public Engagement
The Foundations of Physics engages various philosophies, perspectives, and priorities in physics,
but there are
Systemic Barriers:
- As a historically excluded academic field, there is no professional academic career pathway to conduct research in the Foundations of Physics.
- Either being too philosophical for physics departments or too scientific for philosophy departments, it falls between the margins of academic specializations.
- Women and minorities face biases, especially in abstract academic fields such as physics and philosophy. Direct funding and professional support create equity for underrepresented scholars to participate.
- Standards of success and research in physics are directly inherited from the Manhattan Project.
- Physics hypotheses generated from research in foundational questions go un-investigated because they do not align with funded research priorities in physics, but can create profound advances in physics (such as the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics).
The professionalization of the Foundations of Physics creates pathways for the diversity of humanity to meaningfully contribute to physics.
Kathleen V. Tatem
Founder, Director, and Principal Investigator
Kathleen Tatem earned a BS in Applied Physics with a minor in Philosophy, as well as an MA in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics, both from Columbia University. She studied at the East-West Center, where she also earned an MS in Physics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is the first in her family to pursue college, and has been dedicated to a unique interdisciplinary career path aligned with her personal values. While a traditional academic career path leads to specialization in a particular topic, Kathleen is a generalist in experimental physics. She has conducted experimental physics research in 10 areas of physics and related fields over the past decade, in astronomy instrumentation, plasma physics, quantum opto-mechanics, neutrino physics, gravitational wave detection, biophysics, high energy particle astrophysics and cosmology, and solar physics. Insights from her unique perspective as a generalist in experimental physics contribute to this current phase of her research in foundations of physics.