Prof. Sebastian M. Schmidt took up the position of Scientific Director at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) on April 1, 2020. He comes from Forschungszentrum Jülich, where he was a member of the Executive Board and had been responsible for the research areas "Matter" and "Key Technologies/Information" in Scientific Division I since November 2007. The previous Scientific Director, Prof. Roland Sauerbrey, retired after 14 years in office.
From one of the largest research centers in West Germany to one of the largest research centers in East Germany: Prof. Sebastian M. Schmidt remains loyal to the Helmholtz Association. His path leads from Jülich to Dresden, where the physicist has headed the HZDR as Scientific Director since April 1. It is above all the large-scale facilities in Rossendorf and the broad spectrum of research that attracted Sebastian M. Schmidt to the Saxon state capital.
The HZDR is ideally positioned in the research field of matter with its unique infrastructure. The ELBE Center for High-Power Radiation Sources, the High-Field Magnetic Laboratory and the Ion Beam Center are in demand worldwide as user facilities. With the European platform for dynamo experiments DRESDYN and the Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields HIBEF, further facilities are being created with which the center will attract national and international attention. But other areas - above all energy and repository research as well as cancer research and data science - have also developed extremely well. The new Scientific Director's task now is to use this good starting position for the next development steps.
Sebastian M. Schmidt (born 1967) began his scientific career at the University of Rostock and in Dubna, Russia, and completed his doctorate in Rostock in 1995 with a Dr. rer. nat. in theoretical physics. His habilitation at the Universities of Tübingen and Rostock followed in 2001. In 2012, RWTH Aachen University appointed him as a university professor of physics. Prior to this, he spent time in Israel and the USA: as a Minerva Fellow at Tel Aviv University (1995-1996) and as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Argonne National Laboratory (1999-2000). In between, Schmidt worked for two years as a research assistant at the University of Rostock, and in 2000 he became head of an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the University of Tübingen.
From 2002 to 2006, Schmidt worked first as a member of staff and then as Managing Director of the Helmholtz Association's office in Berlin. There he was already involved in a wide range of topics, from strategic development and implementation in the Helmholtz Association's Program-Oriented Funding (POF) to large-scale facilities, the promotion of young researchers and cooperation with universities to topics such as equal opportunities and student laboratories.
In his own research work, the theoretical physicist deals with the quantum statistics of strongly correlated systems, more specifically with quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and quantum electrodynamics (QED) under extreme conditions. While quantum chromodynamics focuses on the fundamental building blocks of matter, i.e. quarks and gluons, quantum electrodynamics focuses on electromagnetic interactions, coupled via photons as exchange particles.
Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), www.hzdr.de
