Introducing New JMU Physics Faculty Member Kenisha Ford

Kenisha Ford

Kenisha Ford is the newest faculty member of the James Madison University Department of Physics and Astronomy. Student blogger Yvonne Kinsella sat down with her to get to know a little more about who she is, to introduce her to the rest of the department.  

What is your area of research?

I’m doing research right now on genomics using statistical physics to determine if there are environmental factors that lead towards a propensity for certain strains of breast cancer. There’s this strain of triple negative breast cancer that has a very high mortality rate, especially amongst people of African American descent, so I’m trying to see what there is genomically that might determine that.

How did you realize that that was what you wanted to study?

I loved physics, especially the application side of it, but I didn’t necessarily want to do an applied physics program. I worked for about nine years before I went back to graduate school. During that time, I stumbled upon medical physics and I thought that was interesting, but I learned about them mostly doing calculations of dosage of radiation and I didn’t want to do that. I started thinking more about treatments instead of radiation and how you can study that and how physics can be used for that. And, I don’t think that anybody doesn’t know someone who’s been affected by cancer. I’ve known a lot of people with breast cancer, so of course, it intrigued me.

Did anyone inspire you to become a physicist?

Physics kind of happened by accident. I originally wanted to be an engineer. My mom was an electrical engineer while I was growing up. When I was about six, I had this toy — it was one of those itty bitty keyboard things — and it broke, and I’m young so I’m upset about this. So my mom looks at it, she takes the back of, tightens some things or does something, and she fixed it. So I’m thinking she fixed it because she’s an engineer, and I don’t think she thought anything of it, but that’s when I started to think that engineering was cool because they could fix regular things. The school I went to, Spellman College, didn’t have an engineering program so you have to do a dual degree with Georgia Tech, so you have to pick another major. I picked physics kind of randomly. I liked physics in high school but I only got a C, so I wasn’t super good at it, but I decided to try it. So I ended up loving physics after all and never went on to the engineering part of that program.

How did you start working at JMU?

As a graduate student at Howard last year I happened to go to the library one day while they were having a fair, so I started talking to people and I met Dr. David Owusu-Ansah and we started to talk about the preparing future faculty program at JMU. I just asked him what it was and he said that they just try to bring people in to give them an opportunity to teach while they’re working on their dissertation.  He said they usually have people in fields like sociology and psychology, and I said “Oh, you’ve never had physics?” because when people talk about programs like this they almost never bring up physics.  So he ended up asking the physics department if they were interested, and he called me back a couple weeks later and it turned out that Dr. Hughes was interested in seeing if they could do something like that.

What are some of your hobbies outside of physics?

I love music. Just buying it, listening to it, singing, telling people about a new artist that I just heard. In the spring and summer, softball becomes my life. I love pool and bowling but I don’t get to play either of those often enough. I also love shopping which, as a student, I don’t get to do very often. I’m also a big DIY person. When I first bought my house it was a fixer-upper, and I had issues with my contractor, so after he finished the big stuff I took on a lot of the small stuff. Since then, every year I’m like “Oh maybe I’ll change these floors, or maybe I’ll change these lights,” that sort of stuff.

Any other fun facts?

There was one time that I got to hike the Grand Canyon. We camped down there for a few days and hiked the whole twenty miles or something.