New CERN DG

The CERN Council has appointed Rolf-Dieter Heuer to succeed Robert Aymar as CERN’s director general. Since 2004 Heuer has been the research director for particle and astroparticle physics at Germany’s Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg. He will start his five-year term at CERN on 1 January 2009.

Between 1984 and 1998, Heuer worked for the OPAL experiments on CERN’s Large Electron–Positron Collider. He then took a professorship at the University of Hamburg, where he established a group working on preparations for experiments at a possible future electron–positron collider. He will start at CERN just as the first results from its Large Hadron Collider become available (see Physics Today, September 2007, page 32 , and November 2007, page 26 ).

“This is a very exciting time for particle physics,” says Heuer. “To become CERN’s director general for the early years of LHC operation is a great honor, a great challenge, and probably the best job in physics research today. I’m looking forward to working with CERN’s community of personnel and researchers from around the world as we embark on this great adventure.”