Saturday Morning Physics

The Fall 2024 lecture schedule is available here.

Fall sessions begins on Saturday, September 28th and will run through Saturday, December 14th. There is no lecture on Saturday, November 30th in observance of Thanksgiving weekend.

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.

Fall 2024 will also include three off-site lectures for students; Saturday, October 5th will be held at the University of Chicago, Saturday, October 26th will be held at the Museum of Science and Industry, and Saturday, November 23rd will be held at the Garfield Park Conservancy.  Student will need to make travel arrangements or plan to attend through the Zoom meeting.

You can learn more about the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 schedules in our SMP Brochure 2024-2025.

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.

Saturday Morning Physics is for high school students. Provided they follow these rules and guidelines, parents and other adults may sit in on the lectures:

1. Registered students must each have a seat first.
   • If there is space, adults should sit toward the back and the sides of the lecture hall.
2. Only registered students may ask questions during the lecture. Visitor questions are encouraged outside of the lecture room.
   • The venue belongs to the students. Staff want to have a safe environment where students can freely ask questions.
3. Please refrain from using laptop computers in the lecture hall, as it could be distracting to students.

All adults should check with the SMP receptionist on Saturday morning to see if they may attend the lecture that day.

Please note that tours cannot accommodate extra participants. If you are interested in tours, please check out our public tours.

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.