Saturday Morning Physics (SMP) connects high school students to Fermilab science!
The SMP program’s purpose is to further the understanding and appreciation of modern physics among high school students. SMP is a free series of 11 lectures and tours given by Fermilab community. The lectures are aimed at high school students who have no previous scientific knowledge.
Spring 2025 session registration is now closed.
An announcement of the SMP program is made in August for the fall program and in December for the spring program.
Applications will be taken only for the coming academic year and will be granted as the number of registered students does not exceed the maximum number of about 150 per session. Students must satisfy the eligibility requirements listed below.
The Spring 2025 lecture is available here.
Spring session begins on Saturday, February 1st and will run through Saturday, April 12th.
Spring 2025 will also include four off-site lectures for students; Saturday, February 15th will be held at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, Saturday, March 1st will be held at Northwestern University, Saturday, March 29th will be held at the Garfield Park Conservatory, and Saturday, April 5th will be held at the University of Chicago. Student will need to make travel arrangements or plan to attend through the Zoom meeting.
Lectures are held 9 a.m.-noon Central Time. All lectures begin promptly at 9:00 a.m. We recommend that you be in your seat or join the Saturday Morning Physics Zoom meeting between 8:45–8:50 a.m. The lectures are two hours long, with a 10-minute break. Tours and Q&A sessions start at about 11:00 a.m., with everything wrapping up at around noon.
The program is open to high school students in public, private, or parochial schools. Home-schooled students with high school standing are also welcome. In-person attendance is encouraged, however a Zoom link is always provided to facilitate remote attendance. Students may attend in-person or remotely on any given week and are not required to commit to one or the other for every session.
It is helpful to have had a high school physics course and a couple of years of algebra before participating, but these are not required.
A unique e-mail address is required to complete the registration.
Bryan Ramson, Co-Director
Dr. Ramson is a postdoctoral researcher in the Fermilab Neutrino Division. He currently works as part of two large experimental collaborations at the cutting-edge of long-baseline neutrino physics: the currently operational Numi Off-axis Electron Neutrino Appearance experiment (NOvA), hosted by Fermilab, and the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), also hosted by Fermilab. Howard University is his Alma-Mater and he earned his doctorate in Applied Physics on studies of nuclear anti-matter at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Much of his graduate work took place as a visiting scholar on the Argonne/Fermilab particle physics experiment, E906/SeaQuest. Before going to the University of Michigan, he was a visiting scholar at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration from Howard University, primarily involved in the measurement of cloud properties in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. and the validation of a globally distributed robotic aerosol and cloud measuring system.
Nathan Saffold , Co-Director
Dr. Saffold is a Lederman Fellow at Fermilab, whose work focuses on the use of Skipper CCDs to study dark matter. He currently works on the SENSEI experiment searching for dark matter-electron interactions in an underground laboratory, and the DarkNESS mission aiming to deploy skipper-CCDs on a CubeSat. Dr. Saffold received his BA in Astrophysics from Williams College in 2014, and his PhD in Physics from Columbia University in 2021. At Columbia, he worked under Prof. Charles Hailey on the General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) experiment, a balloon-based indirect dark matter detection experiment.
Dylan Temples, Co-Director
Dylan Temples joined Fermilab as a Lederman Fellow in 2021, where his research is centered upon developing quantum sensors for direct detection dark matter searches. Dylan splits his time between the MAGIS-100 atom interferometry experiment and efforts within the Quantum Science Center (qscience.org) to develop dark matter detectors leveraging superconducting devices including qubits and MKIDs. For MAGIS-100, Dylan focuses on developing simulation and analysis tools to extract faint dark matter signals. In 2021, Dylan received his PhD from Northwestern University where he worked with Professor Eric Dahl on the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment. He received his B.S. in Astrophysics from Drexel University in 2015.