---
title: "Notre Dame QuarkNet Center"
chunk: 1/6
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"
---

The Notre Dame QuarkNet Center at the University of Notre Dame was established in 1999. QuarkNet is a nation-wide program that pairs university faculty with high school teachers and students to perform summer research related to physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology. Along with Notre Dame, QuarkNet centers are sponsored by dozens of other universities. The Notre Dame QuarkNet Center is regarded as a flagship center for the program. The program was started by particle physicists associated with Fermilab in Illinois and CERN in Switzerland and has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Department of Energy (DoE).

== 1997 to early 2000s ==

=== Randal Ruchti and Patrick Mooney ===
In 1997, professor Randal Ruchti of the University of Notre Dame began efforts to teach particle physics to local high school students in the South Bend, Indiana community. In particular, he wanted to link students to experiments being conducted at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. Ruchti had also been selected as a United States educator coordinator for the LHC. Ruchti engaged young people with demonstrations at the annual Science Alive event hosted by the South Bend Public Library. Ruchti approached a former Physics graduate student, Patrick Mooney of the Trinity School at Greenlawn, about starting science outreach at Trinity and eventually the greater community. Ruchti and Mooney had worked on the D-Zero project that discovered the top quark at Fermilab in 1995. Mooney stated "We want to see if we can forge some cooperative effort that will fit into the high school's program". These early efforts of Ruchti and Mooney would eventually find fruition in the national QuarkNet program.

=== SSC ===

Another factor involved with the establishment of QuarkNet was the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), an American particle accelerator that had been planned for Texas. The U. S. Congress canceled funding for the project five years before the establishment of QuarkNet. Ruchti was concerned that a major impetus for particle physics research and education was leaving the United States. He believed that a program like QuarkNet could serve to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the center of the particle physics universe from the United States to CERN in Switzerland.

=== National QuarkNet program ===
The national QuarkNet program was established by Keith Baker of Hampton University, Marge Bardeen of Fermilab, Michael Barnett of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Randal Ruchti of the University of Notre Dame in 1998. QuarkNet was started as a network of particle physicists and high school students and educators with the goal of providing hands-on experience in particle physics research. Ruchti established the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center at the University of Notre Dame in 1999 as one of 25 sites in the United States that were part of the nascent QuarkNet program. Ruchti would later assume leadership positions within the University of Notre Dame in 2008 and the National Science Foundation in 2011.

=== N. Eddy St. Lab ===
At Notre Dame, two local South Bend, Indiana Adams High School students, David Dickerson and Daniel Saddawi-Konefka, were recruited in the summer of 1999 by professor Ruchti to build components for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment being constructed at CERN in Switzerland. Two local high school teachers, LeRoy Castle of LaPorte High School and Dale Wiand of Adams High School, also joined to work with Ruchti and the students. The team set up a laboratory in an abandoned Aldi grocery store on N. Eddy Street adjacent to the University of Notre Dame campus. The students began work on 500 calorimeters to be used in the LHC. The devices employed strands of fiber optic scintillating material that would detect light from collisions in the experiment. This project established the annual summer employment for area high school students and educators at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center.

=== D-Zero waveguides ===
During the summer of 2000, the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center would employ students Michael Busk of Trinity School at Greenlawn, Zach Clark of Jimtown High School, and Jenny Tristano of LaLumiere High School. Recruited by local science teachers, the students worked on fiber optic waveguides to be installed in the D-Zero experiment at Fermilab in Illinois. The waveguides were to be incorporated into D-Zero's Central Fiber Tracker in order to carry light signals derived from the emergence of high energy particles from the collisions of protons and antiprotons in the experiment. These collisions were conducted inside the ring-shaped Tevatron particle accelerator. At this time in the early 21st century, researchers were focused on obtaining evidence for the long sought Higgs boson particle which was later detected at CERN in 2012. Physics education was also included in the student's experience. During lunches, physicist Dan Karmgard of Notre Dame provided instruction on topics such as cosmic rays from space. The students also visited Fermilab to learn about the D-Zero detector and modern particle physics.

=== Fermilab Summer 2000 Training Session ===
QuarkNet staff member Patrick Mooney of the Trinity School at Greenlawn was one of the organizers of a Summer 2000 teacher training session at Fermilab. Mooney had been a researcher with the D-Zero experiment and had obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Notre Dame in 1986. 24 high school teachers participated in the Fermilab experience. Training session organizer Ken Cecire of Hampton University had recruited one of the teachers for the summer workshop. Cecire was also a QuarkNet national staff member. He had studied physics at the City College of New York and had worked previously as a high school teacher.