REU Site: Multidisciplinary Underground Science at the Sanford Underground Research Facility

Black Hills State University (BHSU), in cooperation with the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) will host a 10-week Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program centered on underground science at SURF. This program will recruit six undergraduate students each year to participate in exciting underground research projects as well as professional development and outreach activities.

Underground science offers possibilities for interdisciplinary research across a variety of disciplines including physics, chemistry and biology.

SURF hosts and performs some of the most important physics experiments of our time, searching for evidence of dark matter and investigating the physics of neutrinos. Students will be offered the opportunity to engage in research related to these experiments by assaying materials for radiopurity measurements, helping to characterize the LZ detector and performing environmental monitoring studies.

Additionally, research at SURF is being carried out in the study of life deep underground, characterizing the diversity of microbial environments and in the isolation of novel microbes. This research has applications to medicine and astrobiology. Complementary chemistry research will also be performed to determine the local environment in which these microbes live.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.