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Particles and interactions

Particles and interactions

New director for DESY

09 Jul 1999

Albrecht Wagner has been appointed director of the DESY Research Centre in Hamburg, Germany. Wagner succeeds Bjørn Wiik, who died tragically in a gardening accident in February. DESY is one of the world's leading particle physics laboratories. The laboratory also operates two synchrotron radiation sources in Hamburg and has a branch at Zeuthen in the former East Germany. DESY employs 1050 permanent staff in Hamburg and a further 135 in Zeuthen, and has an annual budget in excess of DM 275 million.

Wagner, who is 58, studied physics at the Technical University of Munich and the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg. After spells as a research associate at Heidelberg and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, Wagner became a full professor of experimental physics at Heidelberg in 1984. He accepted a chair at the University of Hamburg in 1991 and, in the same year, became director of research at DESY.

Wagner’s research has centred on electron-positron collisions at DESY and at CERN. He was also closely involved in the preparation of the 1100-page conceptual-design report for TESLA, a superconducting 500 GeV electron-positron linear collider that he and Wiik hoped to build at DESY. The Hamburg laboratory is one of three particle physics centres hoping to host the next-generation linear collider. Wagner has sat on many scientific advisory committees in Germany and further afield, including Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

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