John P. Graham Teaching Professor of Physics
Areas of Expertise: Nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, nonlinear time series analysis
The current appointee of the John P. Graham Teaching Professorship, Dr. Christopher Kulp has an M.S. and Ph.D. from the College of William & Mary, and a B.A. from McDaniel College. He joined the faculty of Lycoming College in 2008, and is now a Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Physics, where he teaches physics at all levels. Dr. Kulp maintains an active undergraduate research group and has 30 publications including articles in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and conference papers. His research interests are in complex systems and machine learning. He has worked with data from a large variety of fields including astrophysics, climatology, medicine, economics, biology and combustion.
Before coming to Lycoming, Kulp taught at McDaniel College, The College of William & Mary and Eastern Kentucky University. In addition, he taught high school earth science and physics as well as a brief stint at a summer program as a kindergarten and first grade math teacher. In his spare time, Kulp enjoys reading, writing science fiction, and playing guitar. He who won the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author for his story titled, “What Would You Pay for a Second Chance?,” and was published in the November 2022 issue of Galaxy’s Edge magazine. His debut novel, "Selection: A tale of fate, AI, and climate change," was published by Making Adventure in 2023.
Selected Publications
C. W. Kulp and V. Pagonis, Classical Mechanics: A Computational Approach, CRC Press (2020).
C. W. Kulp, M. Kurtz, C. Hunt, and M. Velardi, The distribution of wealth: an agent-based approach to examine the effect of estate taxation, skill inheritance, and the Carnegie Effect, Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination 17, 4, (2022).
2019 C. W. Kulp, M. Kurtz, N. Wilston, and L. Quigley, The effect of various tax and redistribution models on the Gini coefficient of simple exchange games, Chaos 29, 083118 (2019).