The Black Hills State University Underground Campus (BHUC) will be ready for occupancy in the fall of 2015. The campus will be housed in a cavern at 4,850 feet underground at the Sanford Lab in Lead, S.D.

This underground campus will allow college students to further their education as well as participate in research opportunities. Bree Reynolds, a STEM Education Specialist at Black Hills State University and the Sanford lab, said the classroom would allow students “to do research and participate with different activities with faculty.”

The BHUC will be dividend into two spaces. One space will be approximately 600 square feet and the other will be a cleanroom of 1,000 square feet.

The 1,000 square foot cleanroom will be divided into a class 1,000 side and a class 10,000 side. This room will have the capabilities to filter out particles from the incoming air. The different classes of cleanrooms are determined by how many particles are present in a room per volume.

Brianna Mount, research assistant professor at the School of Natural Sciences at BHSU, said that, “The class 1,000 side will be mainly used for instruments to support physics, and the class 10,000 side will be mainly for biology and geology applications.”

There is potential that the BHUC could be connected with classes offered at BHSU. There will be a Web page for students to submit their experiment proposals. If chosen, the experiments will be conducted at the underground campus.