Professor Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer Appointed as New Research Director

On its meeting on October 1, 2004, the Administrative Council of the Helmholtz center DESY appointed Professor Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer as the new research director for high-energy physics. He takes over from Professor Dr. Robert Klanner, who decided after his five-year term of office to dedicate himself to teaching and research again.

The particle physicist Rolf-Dieter Heuer (56) studied physics at the University of Stuttgart. He then obtained his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in the group of Professor Joachim Heintze, who worked on an experiment at the electron-positron storage ring DORIS at DESY. Heuer investigated the neutral decay modes of a new particle made up of charm quarks, the so-called psi-prime resonance, which had been discovered shortly before. He then went on to work as a post-doc at the JADE experiment at the electron-positron storage ring PETRA at DESY. In 1984, he moved to the European particle physics center CERN in Geneva. Here, he worked at the experiment OPAL, of which he was the spokesperson for many years.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer returned to DESY in 1998, having been offered a professorship for experimental physics at the University of Hamburg. A central point of his work was to establish the new research group “Research at Lepton Colliders”, whose large number of young physicists reflects the big interest of the scientific offspring. This group plays a leading role today in the European and worldwide research effort towards the physics potential of the future international electron-positron linear collider (ILC), and the development of the required complex precision measuring instruments. Rolf Heuer always held a leading role in various projects both on the scientific and the organizational level, and he is a member of several German and international scientific committees. He will take up his office on 1 December, 2004.