Seven "mini-grants" from the South Dakota Board of Regents will help university faculty members throughout the state gear up experiments for the state's underground science laboratory at Lead.

The awards, totaling $32,522, support efforts to develop the state's Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake. The lab is not yet open; workers are pumping water from the former Homestake gold mine, which closed in 2000 and has been flooding since pumps were turned off in 2003. The state gained the property in 2006.

Plans are to reopen the underground levels, reaching several thousand feet deep, to experiments using sensitive equipment that require shielding from cosmic rays.

Several South Dakota School of Mines & Technology researchers in Rapid City received state grants, including:

* Dr. Stanley Howard, professor, materials and metallurgical engineering, was awarded $5,000 for his project to help build the detectors. They are fabricated from an expensive material called 76Ge. Amounts lost during an etching process to create the detectors would be between $4 million and $9 million. Howard will be developing a way to recover this material.

* Dr. Rajesh Sani, assistant professor, chemical and biological engineering, was awarded $5,000 toward collecting preliminary data on microbes found deep in the mine. These microbes play important roles in biogeochemical cycling of toxic metals and can have significant impacts in the subsurface environments. The data will help improve fundamental understanding of metal-microbe interactions.

* Dr. Sookie Bang, professor, chemical and biological engineering at the School of Mines, and Dr. Cynthia Anderson, associate director, Western South Dakota DNA Core Facility (WestCore)/Center for the Conservation of Biological Resources at Black Hills State University, also received a $5,000 award. The School of Mines has been collaborating with BHSU on a project to study the diversity of the microbes from water and biofilm samples taken from the Ross Shaft at Homestake. This survey will provide information about the risk of biodegradation of materials by fungi, which could prove critical to engineers as they choose building materials and assess maintenance costs associated with construction of the underground laboratory facilities.

* Dr. Dana J. Medlin, associate professor, materials and metallurgical engineering, received $5,000 for his project on processing ultra-pure copper components for the underground radiation detectors. Medlin also will focus on improving the strength of the copper. The project requires an underground processing facility. This will be a collaborative research effort between engineers at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.