Physics at USD is a community of faculty and students dedicated to excellent teaching and to performing research at the forefront of the field, including the search for dark matter.
Physics aims to explore the worlds of matter and energy and the relationships that bind them. With direct access to faculty in a department with a low student-to-faculty ratio, your professors will know who you are and help ensure you're successful.
Our undergraduate program is designed so you receive the best of both worlds -- a broad education steeped in the liberal arts through the classroom and technical skills honed through an undergraduate research experience. The undergraduate research experiences contribute to large experiments seeking to understand the fundamental workings of the universe by seeking to detect dark matter or learn more about the properties of neutrinos. Students have great opportunities to be paid to work on cutting-edge research; develop a variety of engineering, computation, and data analysis skills; and visit top-notch educational institutions in the U.S., Europe and Asia while studying internationally with a stipend to match.
Our graduate program provides high quality graduate education to assist the state of South Dakota in becoming a recognized leader in research and technology development, and to increase participation in the opportunities afforded by the creation of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). We expect students in the program to conduct research activities consistent with the experiments at SURF and to contribute in meaningful ways to those experiments. Students typically pursue a research topic as soon as they enroll in our program with projects focused on experiments searching for rare physics events located in underground environments.
Degrees in physics qualify you for further graduate study and for jobs in such industries as energy, electronics, communications, aerospace and medical instrumentation.
Two faculty members in the University of South Dakota College of Arts & Sciences received funding totaling $1 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) initiative. USD’s faculty, Dongming Mei, Ph.D., and Vijayalakshmi Saravanan, Ph.D., are the only recipients from South Dakota who received this highly competitive grant.
Two students in the University of South Dakota Department of Mathematical Sciences, Oleksandra “Sasha” Lukina and Olivia Roberts, were accepted to attend the BRING MATH (Bridges for the Next Generation: Mathematical Science Research and Our Future) Workshop at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, Oct. 5-6.
Oleksandra "Sasha" Lukina, a rising senior majoring in physics at the University of South Dakota, remembers hearing about a group's ground-breaking scientific discovery and their subsequent Nobel Prize award in 2017. Now, she’s learning alongside them.
Physics at USD is a community of faculty and students dedicated to excellent teaching and to performing research at the forefront of the field, including the search for dark matter.
The physics department truly wants its students to succeed. I’m incredibly confident that the critical reading, writing and presentation skills I developed at USD has set me apart from peers in the field. The USD physics program is the perfect environment to do research and learn how to share it with the world.
Kyler Kooi
B.S. Physics '19
