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).
In July, 2026, a letter was sent to QuarkNet teachers asking them to contact their elected representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and ask them to support the reinstatement of funding for the national QuarkNet program. Funding for the program ended in August 2026.
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.Ken Cecire CV on LinkedIn
Tom Loughran Tom Loughran of the University of Notre Dame participated in a summer 2000 Research Experience for Teachers (RET) experience at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center under the guidance of professor Ruchti. Loughran had obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame in 1986. Loughran would go on to work in various aspects and offshoots of the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center and Fermilab such as the I2U2 education program, Michiana BioEYES, and the Notre Dame Extended Research Community (NDeRC).Thomas J. Loughran CV
Smithsonian cosmic rays In the Summer of 2001, Randal Ruchti and Barry Baumbaugh of Notre Dame installed a cosmic ray detector in a permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The detector was included in the "Explore the Universe" exhibit that highlighted instruments built by astronomers and scientists. Ruchti and Baumbaugh's detector was the only live functioning device in the exhibit and utilized a night vision scope to project live views of cosmic ray particle tracks on a screen. The night vision scope detected faint pulses of light generated when high energy particles pass through a bundle of special fiber optic material in the device. The building of cosmic ray detectors would become one of the major summer projects for QuarkNet students.
NSF funding In 2002, the National Science Foundation approved $3.67 million in funding to continue the QuarkNet program for the next five years with the goal of eventually hosting 60 university based centers similar to the center at Notre Dame. According to professor Ruchti, one of the students from the 2001 program, Amy DeCelles of Trinity School at Greenlawn, had been instrumental in convincing the NSF review panel in Washington D.C. to approve the new funding. The Notre Dame QuarkNet Center was now staffed full time by Beth Marchant (Beiersdorf)Beth Marchant (Beiersdorf) CV on LinkedIn who had been a physics teacher at LaSalle High School and had participated as an RET teacher in 2000. Marchant would direct the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center from 2001 to 2009. Dale Wiand of Adams High School and LeRoy Castle of LaPorte High School continued their involvement with the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center. Wiand had accomplished an RET experience at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center in 2000 and Castle had finished his RET at Notre Dame in 2002.
Student growth A news feature in the journal Nature provided an overview of the QuarkNet program and Randal Ruchti's establishment of the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center. The article stressed the ability of QuarkNet teachers to introduce current physics topics within their classrooms. It also mentioned the growth experienced by students in the program who were enabled to ask "probing questions" during their subsequent high school science classes.
Mid to late 2000s
ODUs
Two students from Lakeshore High School in Stevensville, Michigan, Elliott Mallen and Erin McCamish, were profiled in a newspaper article published in July 2002. The students build devices known as ODUs that would be installed in the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva, Switzerland. The ODUs featured 250 optical fibers and cost approximately $5,000 to make. According to the article, the students had to attend lunch lectures given by professors and guest speakers. As a final project, the students had to deliver a presentation on a particle physics subject. Mallen and McCamish had been recruited by Notre Dame QuarkNet teacher Jeff Chorny of Lakeshore High School and obtained $7.85 per hour of work along with three college credits from Notre Dame.
GRID data team During the summers of 2003 and 2004, the GRID data team at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center worked to create a web page to provide access to test beam data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. The web page would allow students to access and analyze this data and to store their results. In particular, the proton beam from CERN would be tested for purity, and the detectors would be tested for anomalies. The group traveled to Fermilab to learn the analysis of calorimeter data for beam purity. The data was analyzed with a free analysis program named ROOT, which allowed the students to graph data for analysis. The large amount of data required distributed computers located at Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, and Notre Dame. This team was led by Notre Dame QuarkNet staff members Daniel Karmgard, Tom Loughran, and Patrick Mooney along with Lynda Rose of Penn High School. The group employed two students each summer. A summary of this project was published in the Mathematics Teacher for May 2005.
Notre Dame science outreach The Research Experience for Teachers at Notre Dame (RET@ND) program at Notre Dame was highlighted in an article in ND Works, a news journal catering to the university. The RET@ND program drew applications from local science and mathematics teachers to perform summer research on the campus. During the previous summer, three-dozen area high school teachers were employed. The article stressed the example of the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center as a model of success. According to the article, the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center had engaged dozens of physics teachers and students in two months of all-day research in high energy physics. Other Notre Dame efforts were mentioned such as those of the electrical engineering department, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Physics (JINA), the graduate program for the history and philosophy of science, and a teacher education program for elementary and middle schools sponsored by nearby Saint Mary's College. This later program had been funded by a three-year grand from the Indiana Department of Education.
Siemens Competition