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Materials scientist will take the helm at DESY

Helmut Dosch, new director-general of DESY

Helmut Dosch, new director-general of DESY

DESY, the German national research center in Hamburg, announced today that Helmut Dosch has been appointed to replace retiring director Albrecht Wagner.

Dosch is a materials scientist; Wagner is a particle physicist. So the change would seem to reflect a recent global shift in the field.  Labs have been shutting down their particle-physics experiments in favor of collaborating on the next big thing, the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border. At the same time, many are building or expanding programs in photon science, which uses particle accelerators to generate intense beams of X-ray light. That light can be used to examine all sorts of things, from the proteins that make our bodies function to killer bacteria and exotic materials. You can think of them as super-microscopes, as handy an all-purpose tool as the Swiss Army knife.

DESY

DESY

DESY is no exception to the general trend. Last year it closed its HERA accelerator, which in 15 years  of operation produced a suite of remarkable results; see this story in symmetry. Meanwhile, it's coordinating the construction of the accelerator for XFEL, the European X-ray laser project, which is designed to allow scientists to take stop-motion films of atoms in action, and it's running three more photon-science projects.

However, Wagner says the change in leadership at DESY is not as jarring as it might seem.

I caught him this morning at a seminar held every three years by ICFA, the International Committee on Future Accelerators, which Wagner chairs. This time around it's at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Albrecht Wagner

Albrecht Wagner

"I don't really see it as a dramatic shift, which people sometimes seem to associate with a director who comes from a different field," Wagner said. "What I can say, having talked with Helmut Dosch very extensively, is that he shares the overall view of what the strength of DESY is, and therefore how DESY should continue.  It's really built on three pillars--namely the accelerators, which are the core business of DESY, and science in particle physics and with X-rays, from materials science to biology."

Like most particle physics labs around the world, DESY is deeply involved in the LHC, which just began operation at CERN (although a mishap promptly shut it down again until next spring or summer.)  And after developing key technology for the proposed International Linear Collider, it's now the biggest test bed for that technology.

Dosch, who will take over as director on March 1, is director of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research and chair for Experimental Solid State Physics at Stuttgart University. He's known for his research on nanomaterials and solid-state interfaces.

But he's also quite familiar with DESY. He served on the DESY Scientific Council, which advises the lab's director, and as a member of the German Science Council helped to evaluate some of the lab's key programs. Those programs led DESY to its major role in developing technology for the International Linear Collider and to the development of XFEL, which is scheduled to start commissioning in 2013.

The DESY leadership nudged the lab in its current direction seven or eight years ago, with the decision to close HERA. Now it's about to submit a proposal for the next five years. When it became clear last summer that Dosch would likely be the new director, he was brought into the conversation about the lab's future.

"He was included in all the major strategic discussions," Wagner said. "I'm very pleased, by the way, by how the process went. I clearly see that this will be a very smooth transition."

For his part, Dosch had this to say in a press release issued by DESY:

DESY is a brand name standing for top research worldwide. With the new accelerator facilities which are currently built in Hamburg, DESY will shed light on so far unexplored dimensions in nanospace and will continue to play a leading role in the international top league of large-scale research. Particularly, we will further strengthen the collaboration with CERN and the University of Hamburg and create a magnet for junior scientists.