Aaron Titus

Aaron Patrick Titus (born April 6, 1971) is an American professor of physics at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and co-founder of the online learning and homework service WebAssign. Titus has won multiple teaching awards for his work in tertiary education.

Born in Wenatchee, Washington, he received his B.S. in physics from Penn State University in 1993, married his wife Kimberly Jo Titus in 1994, and completed his Ph.D. in physics from NCSU in 1998. A year prior, Titus collaborated with North Park University professor Larry Martin to merge each of their respective online learning and homework services together to create WebAssign. Titus then began to teach at North Carolina A&T State University from 1998 to 2002, then at High Point University (HPU) until 2022, and has taught at NCSU since. Titus has started multiple sponsored projects aimed at improving education in targeted areas. At HPU in particular, Titus played a key role in establishing the university's physics major and Department of Physics, serving as the new department's first chair. Titus also co-authored the 5th edition of the introductory calculus-based physics textbook Matter and Interactions, after contributing to the two preceding editions.

Titus received the Meredith Clark Slane Distinguished Teaching Service Award in 2011, the highest teaching distinction at HPU, and the Excellence in Physics Education Award of the American Physical Society in 2019, shared with an eighteen-member Open Source Physics Team.

Early life and education Aaron Patrick Titus was born on April 6, 1971, in Wenatchee, Washington. During his childhood, Titus lived in several states before settling in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where he attended junior high and high school. with his faith later being credited as a major part of his life. After his first physics class in high school, Titus decided he wanted to teach the subject. During his tertiary education, Titus studied for two years at Rochester Institute of Technology before transferring to Penn State University, where he earned a B.S. in physics in 1993. During the 1990s as a first-year graduate student, Titus met his future wife Kimberly Jo Gossett, a fifth-year graduate student, during a graduate student mixer, where they bonded over similar interests and beliefs. On Valentine's Day in 1994, Titus proposed to Gossett through a letter, which pretended to ask her questions which would prepare her to receive her Ph.D. In reality, the answers spelled out "Will you mar2y me?". In relation to this, Titus created an online learning and homework service named "PhysWeb" in 1996, a service which included animated demonstrations for solving problems. Martin's service notably generated random numbers for homework questions, allowing students to work together on similar problems, but requiring them to calculate an answer with their own numbers to submit. The service remained under NCSU until 2003, when the copyright for some of the service's software code was transferred to its own company named Advanced Instructional Systems Inc., which was headed by Risley as CEO. and was promoted to an assistant professor during the following 1999–2000 school year. While teaching at North Carolina A&T, Titus co-wrote a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation which aimed to increase the number of students in STEM majors. At the start of the 2002–03 school year, Titus began work as an assistant professor in physics at High Point University (HPU) in High Point, North Carolina, where he was later joined by his wife. helping Titus to become a chairman of the Chemistry and Physical Science Department of the university by at least the 2006–07 school year. During this time, Titus also won a competitive grant to create a project designed to provide physics instruction through the use of animations, podcasts, and videos in class.

Titus additionally created both the physics major and Department of Physics at HPU. He likewise served as the new department's first chair, to November 2018. In October 2008 for the 2009–10 school year, Titus was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor of physics and earned academic tenure. In January 2013, Titus was elected to serve as the executive board member representing four-year colleges in the AAPT, a position he held until his term expired in 2016. At the start of the 2022–23 school year, Titus moved to NCSU to work as a physics professor for engineering physics. The same school year, Titus presented a training workshop to demonstrate how modern concepts such as machine learning and artificial intelligence can be used in STEM fields. Prior to the 5th edition, Titus had co-created solutions for the 3rd and 4th editions of the textbook. the "Homer L. Dodge Citation for Distinguished Service" for exceptional contributions to the association in 2019, In 2019, Titus was one of eighteen members of the Open Source Physics Team which won the "2020 Excellence in Physics Education Award" from the APS for continued commitment to computational physics education.

Titus has also received awards from schools he's taught at, namely HPU and NCSU. He received the "Evening Degree Program Outstanding Faculty Member" award from HPU in 2009, the highest award for distinguished teaching at the school.