University of South Dakota, Department of Physics

About University of South Dakota, Department of Physics

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 coursework for the physics major matches the curriculum one would find in liberal arts colleges across the nation. 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.

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 planned for 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.