Martino takes over as director of IN2P3
Jacques Martino has been appointed director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3) by the president of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Alain Fuchs. He succeeds Michel Spiro, who was elected president of the CERN council last December, and took over the role on 1 April.
Martino has been director of the Subatech laboratory (CNRS/Ecole des Mines de Nantes/Université de Nantes) since 2001, and director of the Arronax cyclotron public interest group in Nantes. At CNRS he was also leader of the SBADE (Signal Bruit Alerte Détection Environnement – Signal, Noise, Warning, Detection, Environment) interdisciplinary project from 2007.
An experimental nuclear physicist, his research has focused mainly on nucleon structure, first with the Saclay Linear Accelerator, then at CERN where he coordinated the building of the muon polarimeter for the experiment of the Spin Muon Collaboration. He is currently participating in the Double Chooz experiment to measure the θ13 neutrino mixing angle and the Nucifer project for monitoring nuclear reactors through antineutrino detection for thermal power measurement and non-proliferation.
Martino graduated as an engineer from the Ecole Centrale de Paris in 1975 and gained his doctorate in nuclear and particle physics in 1982. From 1980 to 1993 he was a physicist at the Service de Physique des Hautes Energies of the French Atomic Energy Commission, before becoming head of the Service d'Instrumentation Générale from 1993 to 1996, and then head of the Service de Physique Nucléaire from 1996 to 2001.
McKeown becomes deputy director at JLab
The US Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has announced the appointment of Robert McKeown from the California Institute of Technology to the position of deputy director for science. In addition to serving as deputy director, McKeown will become a Governor's Distinguished CEBAF Professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. He will begin his duties at the laboratory on 1 May.
McKeown's research interests have included studies of weak interactions in nuclei, neutrino oscillations, parity-violating electron scattering, and the electromagnetic structure of nuclei and nucleons. He first became interested in experimental nuclear physics as an undergraduate student at Stony Brook University, New York. He continued his studies at Princeton University, where he received a PhD in 1979. After a year at Argonne National Laboratory, he took a position as assistant professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, becoming an associate professor in 1986 and a professor in 1992.
McKeown has served on the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, the editorial board for Physical Review C and on advisory committees for Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab and Jefferson Lab, where he served as chair of the JLab Users Group Board of Directors in 1990–1991. He recently received the 2009 Tom W Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society for his work using parity-violating electron scattering to study nucleon structure.