Danilo Zavrtanik (born 15 August 1953) is a

Slovenia Slovenia, officially the Republic of Slovenia, is a country in Central Europe. It borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and southeast, and a short (46.6 km) coastline within the Adriati ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

and

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

. Born in

Nova Gorica Nova Gorica () is a town in western Slovenia, on the border with Italy. It is the seat of the Municipality of Nova Gorica. Nova Gorica is a planned town, built according to the principles of modernist architecture after 1947, when the Treaty of pe ...

, he graduated in 1979 from the Faculty for Natural Sciences and Technology of the

University of Ljubljana The University of Ljubljana (, , ), abbreviated UL, is the oldest and largest university in Slovenia. It has approximately 38,000 enrolled students. The university has 23 faculties and three art academies with approximately 4,000 teaching and re ...

. In 1987, he obtained his PhD by defending a doctoral dissertation on "Angular distribution analysis of the reaction π⁻p -> π⁻π⁺n". From 2006 he is a full professor of physics at the

University of Nova Gorica The University of Nova Gorica, UNG (), is the fourth university in Slovenia. It is located in the towns of Nova Gorica, Vipava, and Ajdovščina. History The University of Nova Gorica grew out of the School of Environmental Sciences founded ...

and the head of the Laboratory for

Astroparticle Physics Astroparticle physics, also called particle astrophysics, is a branch of particle physics that studies elementary particles of astrophysical origin and their relation to astrophysics and cosmology. It is a relatively new field of research emergi ...

. Before 1995 he was active in experimental particle physics through international collaborations CPLEAR and

DELPHI Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient Classical antiquity, classical world. The A ...

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

, where he was involved in the development of particle detectors, studies of CP, T and CPT violation in the decays of neutral kaons K⁰ and studies of heavy quark decays, W gauge boson decays and

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the excited state, quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the field (physics), fields in particl ...

searches. Since 1995 he is working in the field of astroparticle physics within the

Pierre Auger Collaboration The Pierre Auger Observatory is an international cosmic ray observatory in Argentina designed to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays: sub-atomic particles traveling nearly at the speed of light and each with energies beyond . In Earth's atmosphe ...

, focusing on studies of cosmic rays with extreme energies. He is a co-author of more than 350 scientific papers and more than 150 conference contributions. He has been a thesis adviser to a number of undergraduate and graduate students at the

and the

. From 1992 to 1996 he served as director-general of the

Jožef Stefan Institute The Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI) () is the largest research institute in Slovenia. The main research areas are physics, chemistry, molecular biology, biotechnology, information technologies, physics, reactor physics, energy and Natural environm ...

Ljubljana {{Infobox settlement , name = Ljubljana , official_name = , settlement_type = Capital city , image_skyline = {{multiple image , border = infobox , perrow = 1/2/2/1 , total_widt ...

. In 1995 he initiated the founding the School of Environmental Sciences in Nova Gorica which grew into Nova Gorica Polytechnic and finally into

. Since the beginning till 2009 he served as the president of this institution and from 2010 till 2022 as a rector. Among his many honours and awards the most distinguished are: " Order of Merit (Slovenia)" in 2005 "Ambassador of Science of the Republic of Slovenia" in 1997 and " Zois Award" (highest Slovenian award for scientific achievements) in 2004.

References

Personal page

External links

Scientific publications of Danilo Zavrtanik
on

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...

1953 births Living people People associated with CERN University of Ljubljana alumni Academic staff of the University of Nova Gorica {{Slovenia-academic-bio-stub