Coventry, RI--Shawn Carlson's office is just down the strip from Dunkin Donuts, Captain Nemo's and Del's Lemonade in this old mill town just outside Providence.

Coventry seems like an unlikely headquarters for a MacArthur fellow and Ph.D. nuclear physicist, but it's a perfect fit for Carlson, who has dedicated his career to the idea that ordinary, everyday people can be involved in science.

In January 1994 he quit his job at the University of California at Berkeley to found the Society for Amateur Scientists (SAS), a national group dedicated to involving amateurs in cutting-edge science.

Over the past six years the society has grown to 1,200 members. With its move to Rhode Island in November, the SAS has hired its first full-time staffer.

Carlson's proposals for home science projects reach tens of thousands of people through his "Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American. And his ideas have been noticed by, among others, Newt Gingrich, who devoted a paragraph to Carlson in an essay in the magazine Science published earlier this month.

Carlson's blend of populism, entrepreneurship and scientific know-how have are making waves in the scientific community.

"The people who never went through college are every bit as smart as the people who did," Carlson says. "Amateurs think of interesting, innovative, and inexpensive ways to get a job done real cheap."

Leaving the Academy