All Hands meeting 11:15 a.m. Wednesday in Auditorium

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone will hold an All-Hands Meeting on Wednesday, July 2. Thanks to savings from voluntary separations and additional funding in the supplemental funding bill passed by Congress last week, Oddone expects to announce the end of involuntary layoffs. DOE Acting Deputy Secretary Jefferey Kupfer, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, Congresswoman Judy Biggert and Congressman Bill Foster will speak. The meeting will begin promptly at 11:30 a.m. Please plan to be in your seats by 11:15 a.m. There will be overflow seating in One West.

Local teachers get physics education from Fermilab

Public school teachers Peggy Mroz and Joshua Norton use Helmholtz coils to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of electrons.

As summer began, a group of public school teachers put down their sticks of chalk and dry-erase pens and rolled up their sleeves for a week of particle physics experiments at Fermilab.

During the week-long course at the Summer Secondary Science Institute, a group of six teachers experimented with optics, constructed a cloud chamber and observed particle behavior using Helmholtz coils.

"Fermilab identifies great science teachers and gives them opportunities to share their physics knowledge and teaching strategies with their colleagues," said Spencer Pasero, education program leader in the education office.

Fermilab Friends for Science Education organized the institute to help local teachers share tips and expand their skills and curriculum.

"It was a chance to conduct experiments we've read about, but have never been able to perform," said Joshua Norten, a physics instructor at Cary-Grove High School. Norten was a physics major at Northern Illinois University and interned for three summers at DZero.

"As far as high-energy physics goes, Fermilab is the place to be," Norton said. "But the workshop is also an opportunity to find out what works and doesn't work in other teachers' classrooms."

Peggy Mroz, a middle school teacher at St. Alexander's Middle School in Palos Heights attended the workshop because she hopes to introduce physics into her science curriculum. Mroz comes from a humanities background and hasn't taught physics.

"Dangling participles I can handle," Mroz said. "Teaching seventh-graders about electrons? I'll need a bit of help with that!"

--Jennifer L. Johnson

Funding re-energizes Fermilab

From Beacon News, July 1, 2008

New federal dollars save jobs, restart projects

As President Bush signed a supplemental budget resolution Monday, securing millions more for scientific research, employees at Fermilab breathed a sigh of relief.

For more than six months, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has been dealing with the effects of a 2008 budget that saw the lab's Department of Energy funding cut by about $22 million from 2007 levels. The lab instituted rolling furloughs, forcing employees to take unpaid days off, and started a voluntary separation program, with the goal of reducing its workforce by 10 percent, or about 200 people.

And lab officials halted work on major projects, including their neutrino experiment, NoVA, and their research into the International Linear Collider, a massive underground particle accelerator they hope will be built under Fermilab.

For at least the next few months, the hard times are over, according to Kurt Riesselmann, spokesman for the lab. The new budget resolution, asked for and supported by Sen. Dick Durbin, Rep. Judy Biggert and Rep. Bill Foster, guarantees $62.5 million to the DOE's Office of Science, to be spread among its labs.

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