Four Elected to SURF User Association Executive Committe

The Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) serves the global scientific community with a mission to advance world class science and inspire learning across generations. The SURF User Association is an important part of this effort.

The Association, founded in 2020, provides an organized framework for interaction between researchers and the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority (SDSTA) which owns and operates SURF. This includes avenues for researchers to communicate their needs and for the SDSTA to communicate plans, improvements, and changes to the facility.

The Association also aims to promote a sense of community for researchers, who live, work, and/or frequently visit SURF and the Black Hills. Furthermore, the Association helps to articulate and promote the need for underground science and its significance to society, while providing a channel for advocacy in the public sphere.

The Executive Committee for the SURF User Association helps lead and guide the science at SURF. This spring, the Association, which includes more than 420 current members from around the world, elected, or reelected four executive committee members.

The recently elected members include:

Frank Strieder (Physics - CASPAR/South Dakota Mines)

Frank Strieder is an associate professor of physics at South Dakota Mines. He received his Ph.D. from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany in the year 2000. His primary research focus is the understanding of the nuclear processes which generate energy in the cores of stars and are responsible for the synthesis of the chemical elements in our universe. He has almost 30 years of experience in experimental nuclear astrophysics at various underground laboratories. He contributed significantly to the LUNA (Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics) project – the first underground accelerator facility in the world - at Gran Sasso Laboratory and is currently a key player in the CASPAR (Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research) experiment at SURF. He was the chair of the 3rd Conference on Science at the Sanford Underground Research Facility hosted at South Dakota Mines in 2019. Since August 2022, Frank is the Associate Physics Department Head at South Dakota Mines and served as Interim Department Head in 2023. Frank is an inaugural member of the SURF User Association Executive Committee and has been nominated to serve a new term.

Jeff Burghardt (Earth Science - CUSSP/PNNL - Multiple Projects)

Jeff Burghardt is an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) with 12 years' experience in hydraulic fracturing research and over 15 years in experimental and computational geomechanics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah where his dissertation work focused on modeling large deformation and high-rate constitutive behavior of rock and soils. Subsequently he spent 5 years working in R&D and operations for Schlumberger, where he led several large interdisciplinary research projects focused on hydraulic fracturing and drilling for unconventional petroleum reservoirs. He joined PNNL in 2016, where he has continued to work on experimental and computational geomechanical research with application areas in geothermal energy, geologic carbon storage, environmental remediation, and nuclear non-proliferation. Read more from PNNL here.

Oxana Gorbatenko (Biology - Multiple Projects/BHSU)

Oxana Gorbatenko is a Researcher II at Western SD Genetics & Genomics Core Facility at Black Hills State University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in both biology and chemistry at Zaporizhzhia National University in Ukraine and earned a Master of Science degree in Integrative Genomics in 2018 from Black Hills State University. Oxana assists graduate and undergraduate students with technical aspects of their research projects and provides research services and lab management to support faculty research endeavors. Her main interest is microbial and viral genomes sequencing and data analysis. For the last 15 years she participated in various SURF microbiome-related projects as a part of BHSU, EGS, and NASA astrobiology groups.

Brett Belzer (Engineering - Multiple Projects/RESPEC)

Brett Belzer is a staff consultant within RESPEC’s Mining & Energy business unit in Rapid City, South Dakota. He has a strong background in the structural and geotechnical engineering fields, and he has a passion for working on complex engineering problems and providing solutions to unique challenges. Since working for RESPEC, Brett has consulted on several multidisciplined mining and civil engineering projects to evaluate the stability and interactions between rock and structures. Brett has played a part in several projects at SURF including the Pre-Excavation, Main Excavation, and Building Site and Infrastructure Phases of the LBNF/DUNE project, 3650L pump room rehabilitation project, 1700L ore pass bridge deck foundation designs, 1700L CAT MineStar Command Center cavern rock anchor pull testing for mezzanine structure, and Davis Campus extensometer monitoring. Brett has worked with KAJV, Fermilab, Thyssen Mining, Prostar, and SDSTA on a wide range of projects including management of a third-party testing and inspection program underground and at the surface, noise and vibration monitoring underground and at the crusher building, geotechnical monitoring of the DUNE cavern excavations, blast door designs, lift plan reviews for slinging equipment underground below the Ross cage to the 4850L, multiple concrete formwork reviews, foundation plans, retaining structures, and rock anchor and thrust block designs for several utilities run throughout the underground.

“It's really wonderful to have three brand new members (Oxana, Jeff, and Brett) join the SURF User Association Executive Committee to lend a fresh, strong voice to the Biology, Earth Science, and Engineering researchers and workers at SURF,” said Mark Hanhardt, a physicist and experiment support scientist at SURF. “It's also great to have Frank re-elected, and subsequently elected by the committee as the new chair, to help us lead the SURF User Association with his experience and enthusiasm for creating a community that benefits everyone. We hope to continue to grow the SURF User Association, foster a sense of openness and fellowship among researchers and workers, and provide a unified voice in pushing science at SURF ever forward.”