Rate My Professor Jean Quashnock

Jean Quashnock serves as Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Carthage College, where he joined the faculty in 1999. He earned a B.Sc. in physics from McGill University and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1990, with his dissertation titled "The First Three Microseconds: Cosmic Strings, Axions, and Magnetic Fields," which studied the dynamics of topological defects and phase transitions in the early universe. Prior to Carthage, he performed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, serving there as a lecturer, research scientist, and associate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He continues to collaborate with researchers at the University of Chicago and Fermilab and has lectured in the Medical Physics Department of the College of Health Professions at Rosalind Franklin University.

A key researcher in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Map of the Universe Project cataloging 100 million galaxies, Quashnock's academic interests center on cosmology, large-scale structure in the universe, high-energy astrophysics and gamma-ray bursts, and absorption-line systems in quasar spectra. He has co-authored more than 60 scientific publications, including "Extreme ultraviolet quasar colours from GALEX observations of the SDSS DR14Q catalogue" (2020), "Galaxies with background QSOs – I. A search for strong galactic Hα lines" (2012), "A CROSS-CORRELATION ANALYSIS OF Mg II ABSORPTION LINE SYSTEMS AND LUMINOUS RED GALAXIES FROM THE SDSS DR5" (2009), "The Form and Evolution of the Clustering of QSO Heavy-Element Absorption-Line Systems" (1998), "A Constraint on the Distance Scale to Cosmological Gamma-Ray Bursts" (1996), and "High-Redshift Superclustering of Quasi-stellar Object Absorption-Line Systems on 100 h⁻¹ Mpc Scales" (1996). Quashnock holds memberships in the American Astronomical Society, American Physical Society, American Association of Physics Teachers, and Sigma Xi.