Prof. Berndt Mueller will be the new Associate Lab Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory from January 2013 to December 2015. During this period, he will hold a joint appointment between Duke and BNL. Below is the news release from BNL. An official news release from BNL is online here.
Associate Lab Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics I am pleased to announce the appointment of physicist Berndt Mueller as the new Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Nuclear & Particle Physics (NPP), effective January 1, 2013. Berndt brings world-class experience as both a scientist and program manager to this key leadership position at Brookhaven Lab. Berndt replaces Steve Vigdor, who retires on December 31 after spending five years as ALD advancing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) research program, guiding the Lab's participation in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and further developing programs in cosmology, astrophysics, and neutrino research. The Laboratory owes Steve a debt of gratitude for his deft and visionary leadership of these large and complex projects and programs which are so important to our strategy. Berndt, an active scientist with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and 9,000 citations, currently serves as James B. Duke Professor and Director of the Center for Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences at Duke University, a position he assumed in 2008. He will continue his work at Duke for the remainder of the current academic year, splitting his time there and at BNL for the next five months. During that time, BNL's David Lissauer will act as interim ALD to share responsibilities and bring Berndt up to speed on existing operations and new initiatives at the Lab. Berndt has a long association with BNL, going back many years, and recently co-authored a paper for "Science" reviewing the scientific achievements of RHIC and outlining the complementary physics opportunities for the next decade of the LHC and RHIC experiments. He has also served on many physics review panels for both the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Berndt has held several leadership positions at Duke, including Chair of the Department of Physics, Principal Investigator for grants that expanded and supported research at the Duke Free Electron Laser Laboratory, and Divisional Dean of the Natural Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and completed his postdoctoral studies at Yale University and the University of Washington. He currently serves as Chair-Elect of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, and in this role he collaborated with Steve Vigdor on establishing a white paper writing group for the subfield of hot QCD matter. As a leading member of the nuclear physics community, Berndt will play a crucial role in the coming years at BNL. Please join me in warmly welcoming Berndt to the Laboratory. - Sam Aronson Laboratory Director
