---
title: "Notre Dame QuarkNet Center"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre_Dame_QuarkNet_Center"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:16:56.689192+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Notre Dame DVT ===
In 2013, Ken Andert of LaLumiere High School attended the Live Interactive Planetarium Symposium held at Seminole State College in Sandford, Florida. Andert started work as a QuarkNet teacher in 1999 and has worked with astronomy professor Keith Davis of Notre Dame in the university's Digital Visualization Theater (DVT) at the Jordan Hall of Science. The DVT is a 136-seat, 50-foot-domed planetarium theatre. The Notre Dame QuarkNet DVT group was established in 2008. Along with Ken Andert and Keith Davis, other participants include Ed Fidler of New Buffalo High School and Notre Dame QuarkNet staff member Jeff Marchant. Andert and Davis teach summer QuarkNet students the foundations of 3D animation by using professional modeling and rendering software. Along with LaLumiere students, Andert and Davis created a 3D simulation of particle collisions from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The simulation was designed to be projected onto a planetarium dome and was presented at the 2013 Sanford, Florida planetarium symposium. In 2016, LaLumiere students Camille Goethals and Oliver McNeil presented a simulation of the entire ring of the Large Hadron Collider at the Notre Dame DVT. To demonstrate the immense size of the LHC, the simulation compared the collider ring to the Notre Dame football stadium. In 2018, the QuarkNet DVT group traveled to France to make a presentation to the 24th International Planetarium Society conference in Toulouse, France. Students Fiona Hughes, Rose Kelly, and Julianna Meyer had worked on the DVT simulation of the LHC during their summer work at QuarkNet in 2017 and had presented the LHC model at the Live Interactive Planetarium Symposium held at Ball State University on July 18, 2017. The next summer, the students, along with QuarkNet and Notre Dame faculty members, traveled to the Toulouse conference to present the LHC model for conference attendees. The students posted YouTube videos about their experience. Fiona Hughes went on to obtain a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University in 2022, Julianna Mayer obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in visual communication design and film from Notre Dame in 2022, and Rose Kelly was a rising freshman at the time of the conference planning to attend the University of California at Los Angeles to study philosophy and computer science.

=== International masterclass ===
In 2014, the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center received an $8,000 grant from Notre Dame International to establish particle physics collaborations between Notre Dame and educators in South America. Directed by Ken Cecire and Mitch Wayne, the Masterclass Institutes Collaborating in the Americas (MICA) program established a partnership between Notre Dame and the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. The collaboration would bring together high school students from Indiana and Chile through an online masterclass where participants would utilize real experimental data to become "particle physicists for a day". The students would interact via an online video conference to finish the day-long session. Cecire and Mooney traveled to Santiago to train physicists at the Pontifical Catholic University to administer the workshop. Jeremy Wegner of Winamac Community High School in Indiana and Jeff Chorny of Lakeshore High School in Michigan performed a complimentary cosmic ray experiment in the northern hemisphere during the workshop by driving from Indiana to Alabama with a portable cosmic ray detector. The masterclass was intended to establish a long-term partnership between the two universities.

=== Indiana University South Bend (IUSB): PICO and environmental sensors ===

During the summer of 2015, the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center partnered with Indiana University South Bend (IUSB) to work on the PICO dark matter experiment. Two QuarkNet teachers and one QuarkNet student collaborated with Professor Ilan Levine to build acoustic sensors within the experiment's bubble chamber. PICO was designed to be sensitive to weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). These hypothetical particles are a leading candidate for the mysterious dark matter observed in space. The PICO detector was supported by National Science Foundation grants and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics of the University of Chicago. The PICO detector is located 2 kilometers underground at the Canadian SNOLAB facility.
A collaboration between IUSB professor Brian Davis and the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center centered around building data loggers for environmental sensing. In July 2024, IUSB faculty and students along with a Notre Dame QuarkNet launched two weather balloons bearing multiple data loggers. QuarkNet high school students Mia Bradley (Lakeshore High School) and Sorel Miller (Bethany Christian Schools, Goshen, IN) worked on the environmental sensors project. Bradley stated, "We got to build some circuit boards and data loggers, which is a super opportunity, and we've also been learning how to program them and explore different ways to utilize them." According to IUSB professor Ilan Levine, the sensors were designed to measure the concentrations of particulates from automobiles and coal burning power plants in Indiana and to provide data on how these values change with elevation.

== 2020s ==

=== Reyniers Life Building ===
In 2019, the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center moved from its old location in the Aldi store located at Howard and Eddy Streets to the Reyniers Life Building on the Notre Dame campus. The old building complex, which also held Notre Dame's Robinson Community Learning Center and the Notre Dame Surplus Store, was demolished to make way for new construction. The Robinson Community Learning Center was moved to a new facility across the street. The Notre Dame QuarkNet Center had worked out of the old lab since 1999.

=== Cosmic rays ===