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Jos Engelen
Science and Challenges of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) programme
Abstract:
Fifty years ago, Europe's first scientific joint venture came into being. CERN
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the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, was founded to provide a centre
of excellence for fundamental research in Europe, and to help unite a continent
recently divided by war.
Today, CERN is engaged in the most ambitious programme
in its history - the Large Hadron Collider. This new research
facility - a 27 kilometre circular particle accelerator -
will smash protons and other nuclei together head on, creating
conditions that have not existed since the Big Bang. Together
with the detectors that will capture these collisions, the
LHC is the most complex scientific instrument ever built.
It will probe questions such as what is the mysterious dark
matter of the Universe made of? Why do particles have mass?
And what was the Universe like in the first fraction of a
second of its life, before matter started to cool down into
the form it has today.
The World-Wide Web was invented at CERN to enable scientists
from around the world to collaborate, and now CERN is pioneering
distributed Grid computing to analyze the flood of data that
the LHC will provide, starting in 2007.
Biography:
Born in 1950, J. Engelen is married and has three children.
After obtaining in 1979 his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Science,
University of Nijmegen,in Experimental High Energy Particle
Physics (K-pinteractions at 4.2 GeV/c), J. Engelen was successively
Postdoc (1979-1981) and Scientific Staff Member (1981-1985)
at CERN in the Experimental Physics Division, working mainly
on photoproduction at high energy (NA14 collaboration).
From 1985 to 2003, J. Engelen has been with NIKHEF (National
Institute for Nuclear and High Energy Physics) a joint venture
of the funding agency FOM and the Universities in the Netherlands,appointed
Professor of Experimental High-Energy Particle Physics in
1987 at the University of Amsterdam, then Chairman of the
Department of Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy of the Faculty
of Science, and Director of NIKHEF in July 2001.
From January 2004 he occupies the post of Chief Scientific
Officer, Deputy Director-General, at CERN.
During these years, J. Engelen has supervised more than
twenty Ph.D. Theses, collaborated in more than 150 publications
in refereed journals, from his participation in the ZEUS
collaboration on e+p scattering at HERA and in the ANTARES
collaboration on the detection of high energy cosmic neutrinos.
J. Engelen has been a member of many Committees and Councils
at national as well as international levels: Chairman of
the LHC Committee at CERN, member of the HEP Physics Board
of the EPS, member of the FOM Council. He is presently a
member of the National Scientific Advisory Committee and
of the Physics and Astronomy Council in the Netherlands,
of the Extended Scientific Council of DESY and Chairman of
the Astroparticle Physics European Coordination.
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