Beate Heinemann
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Beate Heinemann is a German
particle physicist Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and ...
who has held positions at universities in Europe and the United States. She is Chairperson of the Board of Directors at the
DESY DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (English: ''German Electron Synchrotron''), is a national research centre for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to ...
laboratory in
Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...
.


Career

Heinemann earned her undergraduate degree (1996) and PhD (1999) in Physics at the University of Hamburg in Germany. After joining the
University of Liverpool The University of Liverpool (abbreviated UOL) is a Public university, public research university in Liverpool, England. Founded in 1881 as University College Liverpool, Victoria University (United Kingdom), Victoria University, it received Ro ...
in 1999 as PPARC postdoctoral, advanced and later
Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
University Fellow,Beate Heinemann
/ref> she became an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley
, desy.de, Retrieved 5 March 2019
and staff scientist at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...
in 2006. In 2012, she became full professor and senior scientist at the same institutions. In 2016, she returned to Germany to take up a position as Lead Scientist at the research laboratory DESY and a full professorship at the University of Freiburg. In 2022 she became Director in charge of Particle Physics at DESY and full professor of particle physics at the university of Hamburg.. On 1 April 2025 she became Chairperson of the Board of Directors at DESY. She is the first woman to hold this role.


Research

She has published several hundred articles in peer reviewed scientific journals. As a particle physicist, Heinemann's research strives for a deeper understanding of the fundamental particles and the role they played in the evolution of the Universe. Her work concentrates on measurements investigating the weak interaction and on searches for
dark matter In astronomy, dark matter is an invisible and hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter is implied by gravity, gravitational effects that cannot be explained by general relat ...
at the
Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...
(LHC). Heinemann worked on the H1 experiment at DESY, Hamburg, before starting work in the international CDF collaboration at the
Tevatron The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator (active until 2011) in the United States, at the Fermilab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (called ''Fermilab''), east of Batavia, Illinois, and was the highest energy particle collider unt ...
(a particle accelerator at
Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle phys ...
, Batavia, USA, which was shut down in 2011). In 2007, she became a member of the
ATLAs collaboration ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of ...
at
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 ...
, which was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. In 2013 she was selected as deputy spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN and held this role until 2017. In 2018 she proposed the LUXE experiment at DESY and the European XFEL which would study
Quantum Electrodynamics In particle physics, quantum electrodynamics (QED) is the Theory of relativity, relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics. In essence, it describes how light and matter interact and is the first theory where full agreement between quant ...
in the regime of strong fields, and has been leading the collaboration of about 100 people until 2023. Heinemann serves on many committees including the Physics Preparatory Group of the European Particle Particle Strategy Update, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) in the US, and the International Committee for Future Accelerators ICFA. She is also very involved in outreach activities for students and the general public, with a special emphasis on disseminating information about the scientific heritage of female scientists like
Lise Meitner Elise Lise Meitner ( ; ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission. After completing her doctoral research in 1906, Meitner became the second woman ...
or Vera Rubin. Interviews with Heinemann have been published in major media like NYT, ZEIT, and Spiegel.


Awards

* In 2004, Heinemann was awarded a
Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
University Research Fellowship at the
University of Liverpool The University of Liverpool (abbreviated UOL) is a Public university, public research university in Liverpool, England. Founded in 1881 as University College Liverpool, Victoria University (United Kingdom), Victoria University, it received Ro ...
. * In 2009, she was made a fellow of the
American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...
. * In 2024, she was elected member of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg.


References


External links


Personal page at DESY
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heinemann, Beate German women physicists Fellows of the American Physical Society Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century German women scientists 21st-century German physicists German expatriate academics in the United States University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Academic staff of the University of Freiburg People associated with CERN University of Hamburg alumni