No aspect of Fermilab, past or present — the accomplishments of the Tevatron, the popular Arts and Lecture Series, the education efforts, the world-leading neutrino program — would be what it is today without the contributions of women.
In the early days of the lab, most of the roles occupied by women were administrative support positions, as was the case in many workplaces of the late 1960s. While opportunities for women greatly expanded at the lab over its more-than-50-year history, the importance of administrative assistants hasn’t diminished. Then, as now, administrative positions were critical to to the operation of the lab, and they continue to be frequently held by women.
One of the first women to play an important role in shaping Fermilab was lab artist Angela Gonzales. It was so important to Robert Wilson, Fermilab’s first director, for the lab to have an environment that was aesthetically inspiring that Gonzales was the 11th person he hired. She developed the lab’s iconic logo and distinctive color scheme, and she designed imaginative covers for the lab’s publications.
As time went on, more opportunities opened to women at the lab, especially in technical and leadership roles. One of the most notable women in the lab’s early history was accelerator physicist Helen Edwards, who was hired in 1970. She oversaw the design, construction, commissioning and operation of the Tevatron. The Tevatron, which was the world’s most powerful accelerator for many years, allowed the lab’s experiments CDF and DZero to discover the top quark in 1995. She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988 and, along with several of her colleagues, the National Medal of Technology in 1989 for her work on the Tevatron.
Fermilab archivist and historian Valerie Higgins presented a virtual talk on the history of women at Fermilab on Feb. 22.
In the subsequent decades, too many women to name have played key roles at the lab. Young-Kee Kim was the first woman to serve as the lab’s deputy director, a position she held from 2006 to 2013. Other women have been and continue to be leaders in experimental physics, theoretical physics, accelerator physics, computing, education, engineering, workforce development, administration, quantum science and many other areas at the lab.
The people mentioned here are just a small fraction of the women who have made the lab what it is today; any of these women, and hundreds of other women who have served at the lab, could have an entire article devoted just to their contributions.
On International Women’s Day, we honor the contributions of all Fermilab women to science.
Valerie Higgins is the Fermilab archivist and historian.
Mayling Wong-Squires became Farah Fahim’s mentor in 2019 through a mentorship program at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab. Fahim is now a principal engineer and deputy head of quantum science. She works on microelectronics for detectors and sensors operating in extreme environments. In 2019 she’d just received her Ph.D. and was returning from maternity leave. Wong-Squires, principal engineer and head of the Mechanical Support Department in the Accelerator Division, had four years under her belt in leading a team that supports accelerator operations and all its auxiliary mechanical systems. Their relationship has bridged the gap from colleague to friend, and that perhaps even wider chasm — from electrical to mechanical engineering.
Do you feel like being mentored has contributed to you succeeding in your pursuit of leadership at the lab?
FF: Definitely. When we started our mentoring relationship, I did not have a leadership role.
I suffer from impostor syndrome and often have many doubts about myself. Mayling makes me feel I deserve to be where I need to be. I tend to have more confidence in myself when somebody else has confidence in me.
Other than that, it’s basically me lamenting to Mayling all the time. You find that when you’re an engineer getting into any leadership role, you need to change a great deal because your work shifts from being technical, which is all about logic and expertise, to being managerial, which is all about relationships and communication. Having Mayling there helped me a great deal to gain the right perspective, I am undergoing growing pains, as she calls it.
MWS: Farah, you make me sound like I’m so knowledgeable or wise or whatever. Truthfully, from my perspective, all I did was listen. And maybe if I had something to share, I’d share my experience. It’s so good to hear that whatever I did helped, because it was so easy.
I do think it’s valuable for us to have that person, that mentor to just listen without judgment, without criticism and to encourage. But it’s clear to me you are very good at what you do. You are so knowledgeable in your area of expertise. How could I not say that you are good at it?
FF: When you have somebody providing that encouragement, not trying to fix things but truly listening, it helps you to think things through!
Of course, I cannot talk about some of these things with anybody else. I have this open environment with Mayling. There have been days where I’ve just whined. Someone says, “Oh, it changes, it gets better, I think you’re doing the right thing.” That becomes the voice of reason in my head, even when Mayling is not there.
I think if I didn’t have that, I would have quit and run. Having somebody express that faith in you — it makes a huge difference.
What do you think is the importance of mentor-mentee relationships for women in STEM?
MWS: Right now, there are fewer women in STEM than men. So a woman may not see someone that looks like herself in the classroom, in the office or in the meeting room. This may compound any doubts or concerns that she has. To hear that from a mentor, especially for a woman to say to another woman, “You be you and you are good at what you do and don’t forget that,” that is really valuable.
FF: Mayling is right. I’m not trying to generalize here. The way we approach things as women — there are men who approach things like this as well — but overwhelmingly women tend to internalize things. Our failures mean more to us than our successes do. What I mean by that is that when we do have a large success, we probably take a small step within ourselves to feel accomplished, but when we have a failure, we take a large step backwards.
Knowing that we are very self-critical, understanding it, people saying we tend to be that way, that does help a great deal to overcome self-doubt, which is something that holds women back.
I have always felt it easier to work in the background, not put myself in front, and I share credit with the entire team for my work and accomplishments. It’s almost like I have defined that environment and set up some expectations. It’s not that people are taking advantage of me. It’s because I am not willing to step up and take credit for myself. Then you end up creating that atmosphere, and people end up thinking that’s the way it should be. Finally, when I want to stand up and be recognized, the world around me doesn’t change at the same rate as I am changing. People are taken aback. They don’t think that they’re doing anything wrong. It’s the status quo. Then you struggle more because now you start doubting yourself and enter a vicious cycle of low self-esteem. Notice how my response is also self-critical!
Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you want readers to know?
FF: I want to encourage everybody to get a mentor irrespective of what stage of their career they are in. Role models are good because it’s somebody you aspire to be like, but then when you get to have a mentor, somebody’s showing you the path of how to get there. It’s super useful.
Mayling is a mechanical engineer. I’m an electrical engineer. It’s not the same relationship you would expect from your manager. It has more to do with your personal growth that is required with your new position or your aspirational level. I think that’s what a mentoring relationship really gets, or gives, you. Because along with the technical growth you are getting in your job, you need that personal growth and maturity to climb up the ladder or work with different people or whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. Mentoring gets you that aspect.
MWS: The work at the lab is unique and calls for engineers to concentrate technically in specialized areas. So on the surface, a mechanical engineer working on accelerators talking to an ASIC engineer who focuses on detectors — where’s the connection there? But it was a very natural thing for me to talk with Farah, maybe because what she goes through is not uncommon.
And I gained a friend. I’m super proud of her.
Fermilab is supported by the DOE Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
A century ago, physicists didn’t know about the existence of neutrinos, the most abundant, elusive and ethereal subatomic particles of matter in the universe.
Although they are abundant, each individual neutrino is almost massless. Nevertheless, “they shape many aspects of the universe as we know it,” said Hirohisa Tanaka, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
That’s why Tanaka and more than 1,000 other researchers from over 30 nations are engaged in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“Billions of neutrinos can cross through you without you ever realizing it, so they are very hard to get hold of and to study,” said Alfons Weber, a physics professor at the University of Oxford.
Neutrinos come in three types that morph from one into another: electron, muon and tau, and each has an antimatter cousin. DUNE will use two particle detectors separated by 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) to measure how the neutrinos morph, or oscillate, as they travel through space, matter and time. The DUNE near detector, located at Fermilab outside Chicago, will measure the neutrinos and how they interact before they oscillate. The DUNE far detector, to be located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, will observe them after oscillation.

One of the DUNE near detector’s subdetectors, SAND, will detect neutrinos with an electronic calorimeter, which measures particle energy, and a tracker, which records particle momenta and charge. A second subdetector will use liquid argon to mimic the neutrino interactions in the far detector. The third will use gaseous argon. Working together, they will measure particles with more precision than other neutrino detectors have able been to achieve. Credit: DUNE collaboration
The project is ambitious in its international scope and scientific goals. It could provide new insight into the unbalanced mixing of matter and antimatter, the phenomenon that made possible the formation of matter in the universe. Such an important discovery will require both detectors working in tandem.
“Because of oscillation, the methodology is to measure the neutrino beam at the near site and then the far site and compare the two behaviors,” said Luca Stanco of Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics, often referred to by its Italian acronym, INFN. “It is fundamental to have under control all the characteristics of the neutrino beam in the near detector, where the beam is coming from.”
Hirohisa Tanaka, Alfons Weber, Luca Stanco, the University of Bern’s Michele Weber, and Fermilab’s Alan Bross and Jennifer Raaf play key roles in developing the neutrino-snagging components of the DUNE near detector.
Three subdetector systems
Building on lessons learned from previous experiments, the detector designs have become more sophisticated. The DUNE near detector, to be installed about 600 meters from where the neutrinos are produced in Fermilab’s accelerators, will consist of three subdetectors that will sit side by side.
One of the subdetectors, known as SAND, with its 15,000 kilometers (9,320 miles) of scintillator fibers and its 5,000 photomultipliers, will detect neutrinos with an electronic calorimeter, which measures particle energy, and a tracker, which records particle momenta and charge. A second subdetector, based on the ArgonCube technology developed at the University of Bern in Switzerland, will use liquid argon to mimic the neutrino interactions in the far detector, and the third will use gaseous argon. Working together, they will measure particles with more precision than other neutrino detectors have able to achieve.
“It’s a very complicated system,” said Stanco, who leads the group working on SAND.
SAND will sit directly in the path of the neutrino beam to measure its stability and composition. The two argon-based detectors, meanwhile, will be moveable, able to sit either directly in the beam’s path or to be angled to one side. The different viewing angles will allow those detectors to measure how neutrino interactions change as the particles’ energies change.
The liquid-argon subdetector will function the same way as DUNE’s much larger far detector: When neutrinos interact with the liquid argon, the interaction will create charged particles that will be detected by electronics components that amplify, digitize and then send signals to a computer where the information contained in the signals can be reconstructed.
Several earlier generations of neutrino experiments have led to an evolution in neutrino detector design. When the detectors for those earlier experiments were designed, “We had no idea how poorly we understood how neutrinos interact and all the different effects that we need to study to make a robust measurement,” said Alfons Weber.
Liquid-argon detectors need many-kiloton masses to increase their chances of observing neutrino interactions.
“We always talk about neutrinos being elusive and difficult to detect,” said Tanaka, whose SLAC team will provide key components of the liquid-argon subdetector. “You see only a few of them and only very rarely.”
The opposite will apply to the near detector. There, “the neutrino beam we’re producing is so intense that in the liquid-argon subdetector we’ll see something like 50 interactions within millionths of a second,” he said.
The challenge thus created is to identify individual neutrinos, their energies and their types at a rate that matches the flood of neutrinos the near detector will see.
To capture such data, the liquid-argon subdetector will consist of an array of 35 nearly independently functioning smaller modules. Each module in the array will have a mass of about three tons. When high voltage is applied to the liquid argon volume, the otherwise passive electrons in the argon atoms become liberated and start moving toward an array of detection elements.
Liquid argon — cooled to that state from its gaseous form — is so dense that neutrinos interact at an enhanced rate. Nevertheless, some particles escape from the liquid argon detector and their properties are measured in the argon-gas subdetector sitting next to its liquid-argon counterpart.
“You can measure other things in the argon-gas subdetector that you can’t measure in the liquid-argon subdetector,” Weber said. This includes measuring the effects of neutrino interactions on argon nuclei, a process that creates uncertainty in neutrino oscillation measurements.
Search for new particles
The three subdetectors working in combination will make it possible for physicists to look for phenomena that go beyond the bounds of known physical laws. As Fermilab’s Main Injector particle accelerator generates neutrinos that pass through the DUNE near detector, “other particles might get produced as well, particles that we don’t know anything about yet,” Weber said.
“Other particles might get produced as well, particles that we don’t know anything about yet.” Alfons Weber, Oxford University, on research with the DUNE near detector.
Heavy neutrinos and dark photons fall into this category. The existence of heavy neutrinos could explain the perplexing fact that the known neutrinos have a tiny mass, and their discovery could help explain the nature of dark matter. Dark photons would be the invisible cousins of regular photons, which are electromagnetic particles. The detection of dark photons — if they exist — could illuminate the expansive but currently invisible dark sector part of the universe.
And then there is the unexpected.
“I think and I hope we will have a surprise in the physics result,” Stanco said.
The international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science.
Fermilab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.