"If you have the attitude: 'I can have fun with anything,' students will be receptive. That's my theory," said Charles H.K. Williamson, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Williamson was explaining how he bridges the gap between the classroom and the research lab for undergraduate students at a seminar attended by about 40 faculty members in Call Auditorium on March 6.

In his talk, "Synergy Between Research and Teaching: Fun With Fluid Dynamics," Williamson emphasized that demonstrations are essential to "spicing up the classroom." He showed several favorites from his lectures on fluid mechanics, including rolling pens off a table so that they flew upwards (he gave them a backwards spin that caused them to actually lift before falling), blowing enormous smoke rings, and making toilet paper rolls fly in spirals over the audience. "Students come in thinking we'll do just book stuff, but I've got all these little things waiting for them, with the theory behind it all. They think it's all spontaneous, but in fact everything is choreographed."

Williamson has received numerous teaching prizes since joining the Cornell faculty in 1990, including the 1999 Weiss Presidential Fellowship from Cornell and the 2007 New York State Professor of the Year award. He has worked with 152 student researchers in his lab.

"Cornell has an incredible program of putting undergrads in research labs, and this is a chance for faculty to mentor students way, way, way over and above what you can do in class. And we've got great students here -- you've got to admit, it's one of the best things about being at Cornell," he said.

Williamson urged faculty to give students real, unsolved research problems to work on. "In my lab undergrads are getting results that haven't been published yet," he said, "and they love that."

He cited one former student who found an unexpected answer to an old wave resonance problem. For over 10 years, no one understood why a honeycomb-like pattern formed in fluids in a certain lab setup. "We couldn't solve this," said Williamson. The student experimented and found that the pattern appeared only when the setup was near a fan used to keep instruments cool in the lab. "It was serendipity. It turned out that everything published in those old papers had been triggered by some accidental noise source in the lab," he explained, "which is kind of a fun result."

But it's not just about bringing undergraduates into the lab. "It's important to go the other way: take research into the undergrad classroom," Williamson stressed. He supplements his lectures with examples taken from his own lab and often lets his undergraduate research students act as teaching assistants.

Williamson ended his talk with a clip from the movie "Top Gun" -- something he often plays in his classes -- to illustrate vorticity. The beauty of the air swirling behind a jet's wings, he said, illustrates the concept better than any lecture alone.

Williamson's talk was the third of this spring's Faculty Seminar Series, co-sponsored by the Center for Learning and Teaching and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. The fourth and final talk in the series, "Field-Based Learning at the Water's Edge: Reflections on CU's New Orleans Planning Initiative," by city and regional planning professor Kenneth M. Reardon, will be Tuesday, April 3, location to be announced.

Graduate student Melissa Rice is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.