Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, az Európai Nukleáris Kutatási Szervezet (CERN) főigazgatójának díszdoktori avatása a Debreceni Egyetemen 2010. november 27.
Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer was born in 1948. After graduating from the University of Stuttgart he got a PhD degree at Heidelberg University in 1977. He joined the JADE experiment at DESY, the German high-energy physics institute, and later he became a funding member, then the leader of the extremely successful OPAL Collaboration at CERN. In 1998 he became the leader of the TESLA project in Hamburg, which in 2007 was accepted as the basic plan of the next accelerator, the International Linear Collider. In 2004 he was elected to become the Research Director of particle and astro-particle physics at DESY, and since 2009 he has been the Director-General of CERN. Under his leadership the Large Hadron Collider started to work as the highest energy accelerator of the world.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer devoted his life’s work to experimental high-energy particle physics, his 500 journal publications have 22.000 independent citations, he has a Hirsch index of 73. His connection with the particle physics in Debrecen started in 1994, when he visited ATOMKI and the Institute of Experimental Physics. Later on he invited a group of Debrecen and Budapest physicists, first in our Region, to join the OPAL experiment at the Large Electron Positron Collider accelerator, which then involved 330 researchers from 35 institutions of 9 countries. Since then numerous several MSc and PhD degrees have been achieved at the University of Debrecen using analyses of OPAL data.