Nigel Smith to become director of SNOLAB…
Nigel Smith is to be the new director of the SNOLAB International Underground Science Facility in Sudbury, Ontario, with effect from 1 June. He will replace Tony Noble who has served as SNOLAB’s director for three years.
Smith is currently deputy divisional head (with responsibility for precision weak physics) and group leader (for dark matter) at the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is also project manager for the Boulby Underground Facility in northern England and the ZEPLIN III Dark Matter experiment, as well as a visiting professor at Imperial College, London.
Smith received his BSc from Leeds University in 1985, followed by a PhD in astrophysics from Leeds in 1991. He then served as a lecturer at Leeds and a research associate at Imperial College London before moving to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory as group leader 1998. His early research work was in studies of ultra-high-energy gamma rays from astrophysical sources using extensive air-shower arrays in the UK and at the South Pole.
Since 1992 he has been actively involved in the development and operation of underground detectors to search for weakly interacting dark-matter particles and has been a leader of the research programme at the Boulby underground facility.
…and Mnich takes over as DESY’s research director
Joachim Mnich has taken over as research director of the high-energy physics and astrophysics sector at DESY. He succeeds Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who took over as director-general of CERN on 1 January (p15).
Mnich grew up in the Rhineland and studied physics and electrical engineering at RWTH Aachen. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the Mark J experiment at the PETRA electron–positron storage ring at DESY. He then moved on to work on the L3 experiment at LEP at CERN, from 1988 to 1999. He earned his habilitation (post-doctoral) qualification from RWTH Aachen in 1995 and accepted a professorship there in 2000.
In 2005 he became the leading senior scientist at DESY and professor at the University of Hamburg. From 2006 to 2007 he was head of the CMS group at DESY, before being appointed deputy to Heuer on the DESY board of directors.
TU Darmstadt appoints Rüdiger Schmidt as honorary professor
The Technische Universität (TU) Darmstadt has appointed CERN’s Rüdiger Schmidt as an honorary professor. The distinction is in recognition of his annual contribution, since 2001, to education at the university’s physics department on the topic of accelerator physics.
Schmidt joined CERN after receiving his PhD from the University of Hamburg in 1984 and has been involved in several accelerator projects, including the SPS proton–antiproton collider, LEP and the LHC. For several years he headed the programme for technical and doctoral students and participated in the CERN Accelerator School, both as lecturer and as tutor. He has supervised many students, several at PhD level.
The Superconducting Cavity Group at CERN and the Institute of Nuclear Physics at TU Darmstadt have worked together for many years on the development of superconducting cavities for accelerator applications, under the leadership of Achim Richter. Current collaborative work between CERN and TU Darmstadt, led by Schmidt and Norbert Pietralla from Darmstadt, focuses on the protection of accelerators operating with high beam intensity, in particular the LHC.
The academic co-operation between CERN and TU Darmstadt has also fostered the education of students in accelerator physics since the mid-1980s, when Herbert Lengeler began teaching an annual course on accelerator physics at Darmstadt before he retired and was succeeded by Schmidt.