Charles W Fay

Charles W Fay is an Assistant Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Engineering Science at Emory & Henry College. His academic journey includes a Ph.D. in Physics (2007) from Michigan State University, an M.S. in Physics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a B.S. in Engineering Physics from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

• Ph.D. in Physics, Michigan State University (2007)
• M.S. in Physics, University of Missouri-Kansas City
• B.S. in Engineering Physics, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign

Fay's research spans computational condensed matter physics, computational biophysics, and applied mathematics. He focuses on lattice gases, modeling epidemic spread on graph-like populations, and solving non-deterministic polynomial complete (NPC) problems such as vertex cover, maximum independent set, and traveling salesman problems. His work bridges theoretical physics with complex systems in biology and computer science.

His publications highlight trends in computational methods for NP-complete problems and their applications to physical and biological systems. Recent work includes modeling disease spread via network theory, while earlier studies analyze computational challenges in condensed matter and graph structures.