Welcome to the academic web presence of Dr. William Robertson. I am a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and a faculty member in the Computational Science Program at Middle Tennessee State University. If you're a student looking for course web pages follow the teaching link. This link also takes you to my Physics of Music pages which are of more general interest as they include some on-line audio demonstrations as well as my Physics of the Didjeridu homepage and my BBC World Service Radio interview. If you are intersted in my acoustics work you can check out my YouTube video that covers both my Physics of Music course and my sound faster than light experiment (not as crazy as it sounds--see my publications!).

My research interests cover a broad range of subjects in optics and acoustics explored both experimentally and through numerical simulation. Some key areas of current interest are acoustic and photonic band gap materials, acoustic metamaterials, fast and slow wave phenomena (including superluminal sound), surface electromagnetic excitations including surface plasmons and surface waves on photonic crystals, label-free biosensing, signal processing of speech and musical sound manipulation, and the design of innovative diffractive optics.

The Personal link takes you to a variety of pages about me, my fabulous wife Sharon, Gypsy the wonder cat, and the web pages of our pooches (past, RIP) Sassy, Blaze, Rita, Jack Benny, and (present) Silas.

Fun stuff is not otherwise categorizable fun things.

Publications is a list of my publications. Links is a collection of interesting web links.

The link here takes you to my summer 2019 REU project on speech compression.

Enjoy my pages. Drop me e-mail if you have any questions or suggestions.