At a plenary meeting of the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) held at CERN on 16–17 November, Jorgen D’Hondt of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium was elected ECFA chairperson, with a three-year-long mandate running from 2018 to 2020.
ECFA carries out long-range planning for European high-energy accelerators, large-scale facilities and equipment, and plays an important role in building the physics community in preparation for the upcoming update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics.
D’Hondt, who works on the CMS experiment, is co-director of the Interuniversity Institute for High Energies in Brussels, with research activities including top-quark physics and
dark matter. His team is also involved in the upgrade of the CMS silicon tracker and in the development of heavy-flavour tagging algorithms.
He takes over from previous ECFA chairperson Halina Abramowicz of Tel Aviv University in Israel, who is now secretary of the European Strategy Group
This article originally appeared in the CERN Courier