Nigel Lockyer

Construction of an underground facility, including labs and neutrino detector in the Black Hills of South Dakota will begin in 2017 and is expected to be completed in 2023, while construction at Fermilab is scheduled to be completed between 2024 and 2026.

CERN, representing European institutions, is a major partner in the experiment. CERN is currently developing a neutrino platform to advance technology for neutrino experiments with a significant part of this effort focused on DUNE. Fermilab will improve its Short-Baseline Neutrino Program with three detectors: MicroBoone, which is now operating; ICARUS, which will arrive from CERN by the end of 2016; and the smaller Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) which will be built on a similar timescale. All three detectors will work in unison to search for sterile neutrinos and to advance liquid argon Time Project Chamber technology which has been adopted by DUNE. ICARUS, currently being refurbished at CERN after four years at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) Gran Sasso National Laboratory, will be transported to Fermilab by a group of scientists led by Carlo Rubbia, Nobel Laureate in Physics.

The largest of Fermilab's new projects is the recently completed NOvA Neutrino Experiment at Fermilab and in Ash River, Minnesota. NOvA will investigate neutrino oscillations, a phenomenon that could hold important clues to the evolution of the early universe. The first NOvA results, which were released in August 2015, verify the experiment's massive particle detector is detecting neutrinos fired from 800 kilometers away and making great progress towards its goal of a major leap in our understanding of neutrinos.

Fermilab is involved in cosmic research through the Dark Energy Survey, which includes over 120 scientists from 23 institutions in the United States, Spain, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Germany. The project relies on a Dark Energy camera, a high-resolution camera built at Fermilab for a telescope in Chile that will look for evidence of dark energy that is responsible for the expansion of the universe. In March 2015, a team of researchers using data collected during the first year of the survey discovered a rare dwarf satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.

Fermilab is a U.S hub for research into the Higgs boson and other high energy phenomena and is making major upgrades of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector—one of two large detectors located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe.

Nigel Lockyer is an American experimental particle physicist and current director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Batavia, Illinois, America's premier laboratory for particle physics research, since September 2013.

Lockyer began his tenure as director of Fermilab, America's premier laboratory for particle physics research, on September 3, 2013. As Fermilab director, Lockyer oversees a powerful complex of particle accelerators and sophisticated experiments to study the nature of matter, energy, space and time. Thousands of scientists from around the world use Fermilab facilities for their research.

Before becoming Fermilab's director, Lockyer served as director of TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, from May 2007 to September 2013, and was a Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia and University of Pennsylvania. He was born in Scotland, raised in Canada, and attended graduate school in the United States.

Lockyer served as director of TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics from 2007 until 2013. Under Lockyer's leadership, TRIUMF framed an ambitious vision to achieve a world-class program in rare-isotope beams and subatomic-physics research, to address some of the most fundamental questions in science. This vision included expanding the nuclear-medicine program and the formulation of ARIEL, a new flagship facility for the study of isotopes for physics and medicine. Lockyer expanded the laboratory's operations earning a reputation as a national leader and team-builder. He also developed a strong working partnership among Canada's major science laboratories, expanded the number of member universities, and built international collaborations with Japan, India, China, and Korea.

Lockyer is a fellow of the American Physical Society and is well known in the physics community for his work on the particle known as the bottom quark. In 2006, Lockyer was awarded the American Physical Society's W.K.H. Panofsky Prize for having measured the abnormally long lifetime of the B quark while at SLAC's Mark-II. In 2014 Lockyer received the Pinnacle Achievement Bryden Award from York University for achievement in his field. In May 2015, Lockyer received an honorary doctoral degree from Northern Illinois University.

From 2002 to 2004, Lockyer served as co-spokesperson for a 600-person international collaboration known as CDF, the Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment at the laboratory's Tevatron particle accelerator. The project achieved world acclaim for discovering and studying the top quark, one of the fundamental building blocks of nature, a counterpart to the bottom quark.

Lockyer was born in Annan, Scotland. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1975 from York University in Toronto, later receiving his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1980. After receiving his Ph.D., Lockyer spent four years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University as a postdoctoral research fellow working with Nobel Laureate Burton Richter, who directed SLAC from 1984 to 1999. At SLAC, he was a spokesperson of the Mark-II collaboration. In 1984, Lockyer began his 23-year career as a physics faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. While at UPenn Lockyer also lectured on Benjamin Franklin, and taught a class with playwright Tom Stoppard on his Arcadia.