Physicist Randal Ruchti was among the founders of QuarkNet, a nationwide program that gives local high school students and their teachers an opportunity to be involved with ongoing experiments at particle accelerators, such as Fermilab.

The QuarkNet program in South Bend began in 1999 with two high school students from John Adams High School in South Bend, Indiana. The next year, 12 high school students and 15 Notre Dame students joined QuarkNet to begin the work of assembling components for the Large Hadron Collider, now in the final stages of construction in the Alps of Switzerland and France. This year’s crop of students and teachers put together key components of the proposed International Linear Collider. What Ruchti started has expanded into a high-tech assembly plant and physics instruction center.