On 14 December, at its 145th meeting, CERN Council appointed Rolf-Dieter Heuer to succeed Robert Aymar as CERN’s director-general. Heuer will take office on 1 January 2009 and serve a five-year term. His mandate will cover the early years of operation of the LHC and its first scientific results.
Image credit: DESY.
Heuer is currently research director for particle and astroparticle physics at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, but is no stranger to CERN. From 1984 to 1998, he was a staff member at the laboratory, working for the OPAL collaboration at LEP. He was also OPAL’s spokesperson from 1994 to 1998.
After obtaining a doctorate in 1977 from the University of Heidelberg, Heuer has spent much of his career involved with the construction and operation of large particle detector systems for studying electron–positron collisions. After leaving CERN in 1998 and joining the University of Hamburg he founded a group working on preparations for experiments at a possible future electron–positron collider. With his appointment at DESY in 2004, he became responsible for research at the HERA collider, DESY’s participation in the LHC, and R&D for a future electron–positron collider.
