Jane Nachtman grew up in rural Iowa, milking cows, baling hay, and doing various other chores on her family’s farm near the small town of Ryan.

It’s fair to say a career in particle physics was not on her radar.

“I didn’t even know what a physicist was, really,” she says with a laugh. “All I knew is that I wanted to do science and some kind of scientific research.”

Today, the associate professor in the University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy has become a leading figure in her field, working with scientists at the world’s largest particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, to search for clues to how the universe was created.

“When we collide particles at the LHC, we’re creating states of matter that have never existed except right after the Big Bang,” Nachtman says of her work. “You’re doing it with this huge particle collider, but you’re using it to measure something so precisely, and that’s so small—and so rare. That’s fascinating to me.”

Nachtman grew up outside Ryan, Iowa, in Delaware County, with three brothers and two sisters. She took an interest in math and science classes such as anatomy and physiology during high school, and the subjects came easily to her.

Whether or not to attend college was a big decision, however. Neither of Nachtman’s parents went to college, and there were always chores for her and her siblings to do, such as milking cows each evening after school. An uncle who was a school guidance counselor in Cedar Rapids helped the family navigate the college-selection process, and Nachtman found one she liked: the University of Iowa.

She came to campus in fall 1987 knowing she wanted to learn about science and be involved in research, but had little idea what kind. She started on the medical track, working during her first year in a lab that was studying the Cytomegalovirus, a virus with no known cure that causes birth defects in pregnant women. She took biology and chemistry before deciding to consider courses in physics and astronomy.

“I took a little physics in high school,” Nachtman says, “but I didn’t know much about it. So I just thought, ‘Why not give it a try again?’”

The department set her up to work with Yasar Onel, a recently hired faculty member in particle physics.

“The department’s chairman at the time, Dwight Nicholson, said, ‘He’s a new guy. Why don’t you see what he’s doing?’” Onel says.

As Onel began to establish his lab, Nachtman helped by building and testing various types of equipment he needed to conduct his research.

“I noticed her talents. She was very bright,” Onel recalls. “I would show something to her and she grasped it quickly.”

Onel was collaborating at the time with Fermilab, the particle accelerator outside Chicago that has been a hub of particle physics research for decades. The summer after Nachtman’s sophomore year, Onel invited her to join him at Fermilab to work on a new proton-beam experiment.

Nachtman realized she had found her career interest.

“It was really eye-opening because it was a totally different world,” Nachtman says of her experience at Fermilab. “There were all these opportunities out there, and all this science going on. And, it was really amazing that you would build these huge detectors and the entire building would be taken up by different components of the detector, and we were using it to detect something so small. To see the nuts and bolts how everything had to work together, and that even an undergraduate like myself played a role in it was very inspirational.”

Nachtman graduated from the UI with a degree in physics, and earned her doctorate in physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California–Los Angeles, Nachtman reunited with Fermilab, this time as a research scientist. She was content, newly tenured, and beginning her sixth year at Fermilab when Onel called.

He told her there was an opening in the particle physics group at the UI. He told her he had been following her career progression and that she had all the requisite talent, skills, and knowledge to be an ideal fit for the position. 

“I saw a great future for her in this field because she was capable of building equipment and instrumentation, and she was excellent in electronics and circuit design,” Onel says. “So, she was really good at everything, and on top of this, she was great with computers, analyzing data, and extracting results.”

Nachtman says she wasn’t looking to leave Fermilab at the time.

“But I was really attracted to the idea of coming back to Iowa to teach and work with graduate and undergraduate students,” she says. “It just seemed like a great prospect for me.”

Nachtman, along with Onel, now leads the UI’s scientific representation with the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of two gigantic particle detectors at the LHC. Their group has been collaborating with physicists around the world to study the results of high-energy collisions in the hopes that they will yield new information about the universe’s birth and its evolution over the past 13 billion years.

“The frontier is what’s taking place at the LHC,” Nachtman says, “and pushing to higher and higher energies is something I’ve been part of during my entire career. It’s been interesting and exciting for me all along to think we could actually find something, to be part of this feeling of a discovery that could happen at any moment.”

Soon, Nachtman will be part of an ambitious scientific undertaking, called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, that involves searching for neutrinos, ghostly particles that help power the sun and stars, among other basic roles in the universe.

Nachtman hopes to inspire other first-generation college students to further their education and pursue their dreams.

“It was really great for me that I came to the University of Iowa and into the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where it was kind of expected that undergraduates would do research,” Nachtman says. “I knew a lot of other undergraduates who were doing research. Even today, that’s how you can figure out what you want to do in your career.”