NIU Today

Members of the NIU campus community gathered April 19 to witness more than 200 undergraduate research, artistry and community engagement presentations by student leaders and scholars from a variety of disciplines. With more than 900 people in attendance, the seventh annual Undergraduate Research and Artistry Day and the third annual Community Engagement Showcase became not...

The 2014-15 cohort of Research Rookies has been named. NIU’s Research Rookies Program links undergraduate freshmen, sophomore, and first-semester transfer students with faculty mentors in their major or area of interest to conduct a small-scale research project. A total of 49 NIU undergraduate students have been named as Research Rookies for the program’s fifth year...

Looking for a spectacular summer show? Look no further than the night sky. In mid-August, the annual Perseid meteor shower will radiate from the Perseus constellation and appear throughout the sky and NIU’s STEM Café will once again be there to watch it. From 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 12, STEM Café will present...

One is a documentary filmmaker whose works have screened internationally, the other a physicist who has made his mark on some of the world’s most ambitious experiments. Their disciplines couldn’t seem more different. But what Laura Vazquez and David Hedin share is an uncommon drive, along with a passion for immersing students in their work...

For David Hedin – a man accustomed to working with elementary particles traveling at nearly the speed of light – there’s just no slowing down. And that’s saying something, considering that Hedin’s long record of achievements first earned him an NIU Board of Trustees Professorship in 2009. Since then, his research and student engagement efforts...

There is something for everyone during this year’s NIU New Music Festival! Under the leadership of Artistic Director Gregory Beyer, and in collaboration with School of Music professors Geof Bradfield and Ryan Muncy, the festival will bring to campus two sets of guest artist ensembles and will offer three very different programs for audiences Tuesday,...

Two thousand years ago, philosophers of nature believed the universe was made from symmetrical forms such as circles. Physicists now know that a perfectly symmetric universe is a lifeless void – that it’s the asymmetries that give rise to forms from stars to life itself and offer clues to one of time’s most elusive mysteries....

NIU’s Department of Physics is preparing to host the final workshop for Fermilab’s world famous DZero experiment. About 70 attendees are expected for the collaboration’s 30th annual workshop, which will be held from Friday, June 7, through Tuesday, June 11. Over the years, the collaboration has involved 82 institutions from 18 countries and hundreds of...

Scientists from Northern Illinois University and 25 other institutions worldwide are planning an experiment that could open the doors to new realms of particle physics – and new opportunities for NIU students to participate in leading-edge research. But first the core of the experiment – a complex electromagnet that spans 50 feet in diameter –must...

It’s been said that every ending marks a new beginning. So it is with the search for the Higgs boson, an elusive elementary particle that has captured the attention and imagination of scientists and the general public alike. In what appears to be a landmark discovery, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe...

Northern Illinois University particle physicists and thousands of their colleagues across the world are looking forward to fireworks of a different sort on the Fourth of July. Just yesterday, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia announced that scientists there – after more than 10 years of gathering and analyzing data produced by the laboratory’s Tevatron...

by David Hedin, NIU Board of Trustees Professor of Physics NIU physicists and students played a major role over the years in the design and construction of elements of a detector at Fermilab used to identify subatomic particles known as muons. That science is now helping scientists shed new light on what the New York...