Professorship at Goethe University in Frankfurt for Dr. Ralph Aßmann
30.06.2025 |
Dr. Ralph Aßmann has been appointed as cooperative professor in the Department of Physics at Goethe University. The internationally renowned expert in the field of accelerator physics heads the business area “Accelerator Operation and Development (ACC)” at GSI/FAIR. In this function, Aßmann is responsible for the operation of the existing accelerator facilities and for the integration and commissioning of the international particle accelerator facility FAIR, which is currently under construction. The university and GSI/FAIR have a long-standing successful collaboration, particularly in the field of research and development in accelerator physics. Professor Aßmann will provide the students of the department with valuable insights into scientific practice.
About Professor Dr. Ralph Aßmann
Ralph Aßmann has obtained his doctorate in physics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. His PhD research was performed at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich and at CERN in the ALEPH experiment on the mass of the Z boson, spin polarized particle beams and precise energy calibration. He then spent almost four years as research associate and staff at Stanford University and SLAC, where he worked on operation, modelling and design of the colliders.
For the next 15 years he worked at CERN in leading roles on the LEP and LHC colliders. He was an LHC machine coordinator in run I of the LHC operation, that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. In this role he helped to commission and to optimize the world-leading proton and heavy ion beams of the LHC.
In Summer 2012 he moved as Leading Scientist for Accelerator R&D to DESY, where he researched new, compact accelerators. He was awarded an ERC synergy grant together with three colleagues in 2014. Until 2024, Dr. Aßmann was the founding coordinator of the EuPRAXIA ESFRI project, a 569 M€ project on building the world-wide first user facility based on plasma-based accelerators that is supported by more than 50 institutes.
He has been the Chair of the Accelerator Group in the European Physical Society from 2020 - 2023, the proposer and initial coordinating PI of the 30 M€ Helmholtz ATHENA project, the leader of several European funding grants and coordinator of the European Network for Novel Accelerators. Since 2023, he is the head of the business area “Accelerator Operation and Development (ACC)” at GSI/FAIR.