Greece submits the candidature of Professor Dimitri Nanopoulos for CERN Director-General

Greece has proposed Professor Dimitri Nanopoulos, a distinguished Greek physicist for the post of Director General to Geneva’s top research  centre for high energy physics, CERN.

The proposal was submitted to CERN <http://greece.greekreporter.com/tag/cern/> by Greece’s Permanent Mission in Geneva on Wednesday, May 28 2014 and the selection process is  expected to be completed by December.

Professr Dimitri Nanopoulos is currently vice-president (and elected  president for 2015) of the Academy of Athens. He has also worked as a  senior research physicist at CERN for many years. His team in 1976 was  the first to propose the ‘Higgs-strahlung” process, where a Higgs boson  is radiating from a Z-boson, which proved to be the best way to search  for a Higgs boson at the Large Electron-Positron Collider. This  contribution was also recognized by Peter Higgs himself, in his  acceptance speech for the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Apart from his post in the Athens Academy, Nanopoulos is also holder of  the Mitchell-Heep Chair in High-Energy Physics at Texas A&M Department  of Physics and Astronomy and serves as head of the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) astroparticle physics group. Since January 2013  he has been appointed as Greece’s delegate to the CERN Council, a  position he also held between 2005 and 2010. During his service he  supported the Greek scientific community for Particle Physics in various  ways, facilitating and promoting the national participation in all  research programs of CERN. He has also regulated favorably the economic  contribution of Greece to the Organization aiming at increasing the  participation of Greek scientists and researchers in CERN’s experiments.

"The nomination of Professor Dimitri V. Nanopoulos for the post of  Director General of CERN is very important and honorable for Greece,"  noted the General Secretary for Research and Technology, Mr Christos  Vasilakos, adding that "with such a strong candidacy our country is  promoted internationally, since it is the position of the head of a  high-profile international organization, which has recently come to the  forefront due to the discovery of the Higgs Boson".

Greece is a founding member if CERN since 1954.

*PROF. DIMITRI V. NANOPOULOS*

He was born in Athens. He studied Physics at the University of Athens  and he graduated in 1971. He continued his studies at the University of  Sussex in England, where he got his Ph.D. in 1973, in High Energy  Physics. He has been a Research Fellow at the Center of European Nuclear  Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland and for many years he has been a  staff member. He has also been a Research Fellow in  EcoleNormaleSuperieure, in Paris, France and in Harvard University,  Cambridge, USA. In 1989, he was elected professor at the Department of Physics, at Texas A&M University where since 1992 he is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and since 2002 he holds the Mitchell/Heep Chair in High Energy Physics. He is also Head of the Astroparticle Physics Group in Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), in Houston, Texas, USA, where he is in charge of a research department of the World Laboratory, which is based in Switzerland. In 1997 he was appointed regular member of the Academy of Athensand in 2014 he became vice president of the Academy of Athens. From 2005 to 2009 hewas the chairman of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology. He has served as the National representative of Greece to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) from 2005 to 2010 and again from 2013 until today. He was also the National representative of Greece to the European Space Agency (ESA) from 2005 to 2006.

He has made several contributions to particle physics and cosmology. He works in string unified theories, fundamentals of quantum theory, astroparticle physics and quantum-inspired models of brain function.

He has written over 660 original papers, all published in peer-reviewed journals, with high impact factor, including 14 books. He has over 41.000 citations (h_index=98), placing him as the fourth (4th) most cited High EnergyPhysicist of all time according to the 2001 and 2004 census. Since 1988 he is fellow of the American Physical Society and since 1992 a member of the Italian Physical Society. In 1996, he was awarded the Commander of the Order of Honour of the Greek State and in 2005, celebration year of the 100th anniversary of the Einstein’s Relativity Theory, he received for the 2nd time (first time was in 1999) the 1st place award from the Gravity Research Foundation (Massachusetts, U.S.A.). In 2006 he received the “Onassis International Prize” and in 2009 the “Enrico Fermi” Prize.