Small businesses invited to join Fermilab to discuss partnership opportunities on March 14
Editor’s note: The registration deadline for the event has been extended to March 9.
Registration is now open for Fermilab’s 2018 Small Business Fair, to be held on March 14. Representatives from local small businesses are invited to discuss opportunities to strengthen relationships between the lab and the local business community.
The half-day session (8 a.m. to noon) will be hosted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Local businesses will be made aware of opportunities to bid for subcontracts for work on Fermilab projects and will be connected to key people at the lab who can guide them through those opportunities.
“Our success at this event would mean awarding future subcontracts to small businesses from connections made at the fair,” said Jane Graves, procurement administrator and event chair.
In the long term, she said, Fermilab aims to increase access to opportunities with the private sector, especially local and small businesses.
Fermilab generates millions in economic output for the state of Illinois each year and supports thousands of jobs. Projects such as the Illinois Accelerator Research Center create partnership and job opportunities across the state and will create more as an incubator for technology companies.
In addition, attendees will be able to learn more about how they can access Fermilab’s unique technologies, capabilities and facilities to create potentially game-changing innovations. Through Fermilab’s Partnerships and Technology Transfer program, industry partners are able to license Fermilab patented and copyrighted technologies; use unique facilities and technical services through Strategic Partnership Projects (SPP) agreements; or participate in joint research through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA).
Fermilab’s long history of making its technology available started in 1946, when its first director, Robert Wilson, proposed using particle accelerators to treat cancer. This was made a reality when, in 1990, Fermilab installed the first proton therapy accelerator in the United States at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in California.
Fermilab leaders hope to strengthen relationships with local and businesses, ensuring that local companies can benefit from the infrastructure and technology created for the laboratory’s research.
Registration is open until March 9. Please visit http://events.fnal.gov/smallbusiness to apply, and contact Jane Graves at 630-840-4194 or jgraves@fnal.gov with questions about registration.
Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC, a joint partnership between the University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association Inc. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.
The DOE 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 http://science.energy.gov.
At the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment collaboration meeting in January, held at CERN, DUNE co-spokesperson Mark Thomson from the University of Cambridge presented DUNE collaborators with a long list of accomplishments. Beautiful pictures showed the progress that DUNE has made on the installation of cryostats and detector components for prototype detectors, called the ProtoDUNE detectors, which are housed in a large facility at CERN. He also recognized the “vast amount of progress” made with regard to the planning of the massive DUNE far detectors, to be installed at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.
Thomson congratulated CERN and the ProtoDUNE team for their work, while in the same breath reminding the audience of the work ahead to complete the prototype detectors and prepare for data taking this fall using a beam from the CERN accelerator complex.
“We need to maintain this impressive momentum,” he said. “We need to continue to confound expectations.”
The DUNE collaboration continues to grow. In the past 12 months more than a dozen institutions and about 150 scientists have joined the collaboration, which now comprises 1,075 members from 175 institutions in 31 countries.
A large portion of the collaboration meeting was devoted to the planning of the DUNE Technical Design Report, which will document the technical specifications of all detector components. The Far Detector TDR is to be submitted to the Long-Baseline Neutrino Committee in April 2019. It will serve as the foundation for receiving final construction approval for the detectors.
According to DUNE co-spokesperson Ed Blucher from the University of Chicago, the meeting had the largest attendance of any DUNE collaboration meeting so far: 275 attendees and around 200 talks presented.
The DUNE collaboration meets at CERN in January 2018. Photo: CERN
Orchids have enduring cultural associations with perfection and beauty because of their petals’ marked symmetry. They fit in well at Fermilab, whose grounds feature balanced architecture and whose scientists look for mathematical symmetries in the subatomic universe.
In 2017 Fermilab Ecologist Ryan Campbell helped institute a plan to introduce a rare, native orchid species — commonly known as the eastern prairie fringed orchid — to aid in population recovery.
Draining wetlands and prairies in the Midwest over the past two centuries led to decimated populations of this specialized species. They are now listed as federally threatened and state-endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Habitat loss is a really big factor in why this species is endangered and now considered federally threatened,” Campbell said.
Fermilab boasts some of the best restored prairie habitats in Illinois. Campbell recently planted the orchids strategically at seven different sites that matched the habitat they normally grow in, called wet prairie.
The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service granted Fermilab the uncommon opportunity to cultivate this species without affecting the laboratory’s science program. They provided the first batch of valuable seeds and will continue to supply seeds for another four years, increasing the number of flowers on the grounds and the number of sites where they’re planted.
Fermilab keeps track of many animals and plants in its habitats, helping them flourish by removing invasive species and introducing those they naturally live with, like the eastern prairie fringed orchid. This helps restore a habitat’s native species diversity.
“The philosophy at Fermilab is managing our habitats in a way that promotes all types of diversity, like genetic diversity and overall ecosystem diversity,” Campbell said.
After establishing an eastern prairie fringed orchid population on its grounds, Fermilab hopes to help restore its populations at other sites. A restoration team can cross-pollinate the flowers at Fermilab and provide seeds to other land management areas. Introducing seeds or pollen from elsewhere increases genetic diversity and benefits populations as a whole.
“If a population is established, we can use the pollen and seed produced to augment other Illinois eastern prairie fringed orchid populations,” said Cathy Pollack of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is the rangewide lead for the species and worked with Fermilab to develop the project.
Distribution of seeds to other areas means that someday the orchids could be a common sight in prairie habitats across Illinois, if one is careful enough to look.
“When you learn to appreciate the prairies in the Midwest, you can look down at just a square meter and see something that you would never have noticed before,” Campbell said.