Dosch tapped for DESY

On 1 March 2009, Helmut Dosch will take over as director of DESY, the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg. He will succeed Albrecht Wagner, who is retiring after a decade at the lab’s helm.

Dosch will join DESY from a directorship at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart. He is best known for his research on solid-state interfaces and nanomaterials using synchrotron radiation. Although DESY started out as a particle-physics lab, it now has two storage rings and a linear accelerator used for photon science, and it is building an x-ray free electron laser (XFEL).

Among the challenges awaiting Dosch are to keep DESY a hub for high-energy physics, speed up the construction of the XFEL, and secure funding to keep up with the rising cost of running the lab—“I don’t consider shutting down expensive high-tech facilities as a possible option,” he says. He also plans to build up the in-house research in photon science and to “enhance the collaboration with CERN.”

“DESY is engaged in the type of fundamental research which attracted me to physics when I was 18,” says Dosch. “For me it is a big honor to lead this world-famous lab.”