SWOSU Press Release

Weatherford, OK – The Southwestern Oklahoma State University (SWOSU) Department of Chemistry and Physics will host its annual Engineering Physics Spring Banquet on Saturday, April 26, at the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford. Dinner will be served at approximately 7 p.m., but the museum will be open at 6 p.m., allowing guests to view exhibits before the meal. Alumni, current students, families, faculty, and administrators are invited to attend to recognize student accomplishments and program milestones.

Following dinner, the program will include the induction of new members into Sigma Pi Sigma, the national physics honor society. Awards will be presented for academic achievement and contributions to the physics program, and recipients of scholarships for the upcoming academic year will be announced.

The evening will conclude with a keynote address by Dr. Dylan Frizzell, a 2014 SWOSU Engineering Physics graduate and current Director of Data Science for Agile Defense. His talk, titled “What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up,” will highlight his career path. Beginning with his time as a student at SWOSU and extending through a series of roles in both academic and national defense sectors.

Tickets for the banquet are $25 per person. Payment may be made at the door, but reservations must be submitted in advance to ensure an accurate head count. The deadline to reserve tickets is Wednesday, April 23. Reservations can be made by calling 580-774-3109, emailing physics@swosu.edu, or mailing a note to Dr. Terry Goforth at 100 Campus Dr., Weatherford, OK 73096.

About Dr. Dylan Frizzell

Frizzell, an Oklahoma native, was raised on a farm in Mountain View and earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from SWOSU in 2014. He completed both his master’s and doctoral degrees in high energy physics at the University of Oklahoma with a thesis titled “Observation of Single top Quark with Associated Z Boson Production at the Large Hadron Collider using the ATLAS Detector.” During his thesis research, Dylan worked at Argonne National Lab, Fermilab, and spent two years at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. He contributed to publications involving dark matter searches, silicon pixel detector construction, statistical methods, and machine learning techniques. His collaborative work on the ATLAS team to make detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties was recently awarded a share in the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

After earning his Ph.D., Frizzell joined Boeing Defense Systems as a software engineer, working on the E7 wedge-tail and AWACs platforms focusing on data fusion algorithms. Later in his career, he began work as a Data Scientist at Intellibridge LLC specializing in National Defense and Homeland Security. He has designed and built artificial intelligence systems for projects related to national security and public sector operations.

In addition to his current role at Agile Defense, Frizzell serves as a fate consultant for oil and gas companies under the entity Data Cowboys, LLC, and he remains active in agriculture on his family farm. He lives in Piedmont with his wife Carly and their son Bennett.

About Southwestern Oklahoma State University

Southwestern Oklahoma State University (SWOSU) was founded in 1901 and offers over 100 undergraduate and graduate programs across three locations in Weatherford, Sayre, and Yukon. The university serves over 5,000 scholars and prides itself on affordability, small class sizes, and over 200 faculty and staff committed to helping students achieve their academic and personal goals.