Topic: Under the Canadian Shield: Science Now and the Future of SNOLAB
SNOLAB is the world's deepest-cleanest laboratory, a 5000 square-metre, class-2000 (or better) cleanroom science facility located 6800 feet under the dense Canadian shield in an active nickel mine in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. This talk will review SNOLAB's science portfolio, a cross-cutting blend of neutrino science, searches for dark matter particles, novel industrial chemistry, and biological studies of the role of natural radiation in sustaining life. We'll look from the present toward the possible future of the laboratory with a glimpse at some outcomes of the SNOLAB 15-year planning exercise, including critical input from the scientific community.
Speaker: Stephen (Steve) Sekula
Dr. Stephen Sekula is the Research Group Manager at SNOLAB and Professor of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He earned his PhD in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison after completing his Bachelor of Science at Yale University. He held post-doctoral research positions at MIT and The Ohio State University and was a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas from 2009-2022.
His primary research areas are the study of neutrinos and the search for dark matter. He is Co-Spokesperson of the Helium and Lead Observatory (HALO) supernova early warning detector and recently concluded a term as Science Board Chair for the PICO dark matter search experiment. He is particularly proud of the excellent high school, undergraduate and graduate students and post-doctoral researchers that he works with in his research programs. He previously worked on the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory and is a co-laureate for the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his contributions to that program.
He is also a co-author or author of several books, including an advanced textbook for graduate students, "The Dark Matter Discoverer's Guidebook", written with his spouse and colleague, Dr. Jodi Cooley.
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