Beate Heinemann

Beate Heinemann
Heinemann in February 2024
Scientific career
Fields	Particle physics
Institutions	DESY laboratory in Hamburg and the University of Hamburg

Beate Heinemann is a German particle physicist who has held positions at universities in Europe and the United States. She is the Director in charge of Particle Physics at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg and full professor of particle physics at the university of Hamburg.

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 in 1999 as PPARC postdoctoral, advanced and later Royal Society University Fellow, she became an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley and staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 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 at the University of Hamburg in 2023.

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 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Heinemann worked on the H1 experiment at DESY, Hamburg, before starting work in the international CDF collaboration at the Tevatron (a particle accelerator at Fermilab, Batavia, USA, which was shut down in 2011).

In 2007, she became a member of the ATLAs collaboration at CERN, 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 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 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 University Research Fellowship at the University of Liverpool.
• In 2009, she was made a fellow of the American Physical Society.

External links

• Personal page at DESY