Helmut Dosch takes the helm at DESY

Perfect handover: Albrecht Wagner passes the baton to his successor Helmut Dosch.

Professor Helmut Dosch has taken office as Chair of the DESY Board of Directors. At the ceremony on 2 March, the outgoing DESY Director Professor Albrecht Wagner symbolically passed the baton to his successor.

„DESY is an international brand name for fundamental research at its best and stands for all the questions that made me study physics when I was 18 years old. I am looking forward to extend the leading position of this research centre, with the collaboration of all DESY colleagues,“ said new DESY Director Helmut Dosch.

Professor Helmut Dosch was born in Rosenheim (Bavaria) in 1955. The solid-state physicist used to be Director of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart and Professor at Stuttgart University. Dosch is internationally renowned for the research of solid-state interfaces and nanomaterials with synchrotron radiation.

Helmut Dosch is no stranger to DESY. He counselled the DESY Directorate as a member of the DESY Scientific Council, and, as member of the German Council of Science and Humanities, he evaluated the TESLA/XFEL project which later developed into the European X-ray free-electron laser XFEL and the International Linear Collider ILC.

DESY's Directors in front of the 50th-anniversary logo that they have just created (from the left: Ulrich Gensch, Reinhard Brinkmann, Albrecht Wagner, Helmut Dosch, Christian Scherf, Joachim Mnich and Edgar Weckert).

Parallel to Helmut Dosch's start as new Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors DESY also starts celebrating its 50th anniversary. A schedule of planned events is here.