After about a year as interim director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, Christoph Leemann now holds the top job. He succeeds Hermann Grunder, the founding director of the nuclear physics lab, who left in fall 2000 to head up Argonne National Laboratory.
Leemann earned his PhD in experimental nuclear physics in 1969 in his native Switzerland. He spent most of his early career at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and joined Jefferson Lab at its inception in 1985.
As associate director for accelerators, Leemann oversaw construction of Jefferson Lab’s centerpiece, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, a 6-GeV accelerator with a high-intensity, spin-polarized beam, which came online in 1994. CEBAF is used to probe atomic nuclei and to understand how their constituent quarks and gluons affect nucleon–nucleon interactions.
Jefferson Lab’s other big facility is a free electron laser, used for basic, industrial, and defense research...
