17.04.2014

Matthew Wing wins Humboldt Foundation's Bessel Research Award

Particle physicist Matthew Wing was awarded a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the German Humboldt Foundation. The 40-year-old professor at University College London (UCL) will use the award to stay at DESY for a year and intensify collaborative research in fields of data analysis as well as linear collider and plasma accelerator development together with DESY experts.

Matthew Wing is well known at DESY. He started his PhD thesis here in Hamburg at HERA´s ZEUS experiment. Also after his appointment for a professorship for particle physics at UCL he kept the ties to the ZEUS collaboration, being its chairperson for data analysis in 2005 and deputy spokesperson from 2007 to 2009. Since September 2013, Matthew is spokesperson of the ZEUS collaboration. After winning a Humboldt fellowship in 2008, Matthew was nominated for the recent research award by Brian Foster, Humboldt professor at DESY.

Back at DESY again, Matthew Wing will engage in research and development for data acquisition systems for the detector of a future linear collider as well as research for future plasma wakefield acceleration concepts. But Matthew is also still in love with his more traditional experiments: one of his immediate tasks after winning the award is to conduct the next big publication of HERA´s experiments: the combined data of the proton structure of H1 and ZEUS.

The Humboldt Foundation aims to promote academic cooperation between excellent scientists and scholars from abroad and from Germany in a broad range of academic disciplines. Each year, the Foundation grants up to 25 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Awards, named after one of the most known German mathematicians and scientists of the 19^th century. The awards are given to scientists already internationally renowned in their field, who in future are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements which will have a seminal influence on their discipline beyond their immediate field of work. Award winners are honoured for their outstanding research record and invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany.