Professor Joachim Mnich is the Director for Research and Computing of CERN since January 2021. He is an expert in both electroweak physics and detector development at e+e- and hadron colliders and has many years of experience working in science management. Mnich studied electrical engineering and physics at RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) Aachen University and completed his PhD in physics in 1987, working on the Mark-J experiment at the German national laboratory DESY.

He then came to CERN to join the L3 collaboration at the LHC’s predecessor, LEP, working on the tracking chamber and the determination of Z parameters, as well as serving as L3 analysis coordinator. When he became a university professor in Aachen in 2000 he joined the CMS experiment to work on the construction of the silicon tracker and the preparation for Standard Model measurements.

In 2005, Mnich was called to Hamburg to join the DESY research centre as Lead Scientist and professor at the University of Hamburg. Here, he led the CMS group at DESY and coordinated an EU project called EUDET for the development of future detector technologies. In 2009 he was appointed as Research Director of DESY.

Mnich is a member and chair of many international committees and was Chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) from 2015 to 2017.