Beate Heinemann

Beate Heinemann is a German particle physicist who has held positions at universities in Europe and the United States. She is Chairperson of the Board of Directors at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg.

Career Heinemann was born in 1970 in Hamburg. 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 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 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. 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. and Der Spiegel.

Awards In 2004, Heinemann was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Liverpool. In 2024, she was elected member of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg.