Mark Thomson to become CERN’s new director-general from 2026
Keystone-SDA
The CERN Council has chosen British physicist Mark Thomson as the organisation’s next director-general.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will make the formal appointment at the December Council session and Thomson’s five-year term will begin on January 1, 2026.
“Mark Thomson is a talented physicist with great managerial experience,” said current CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti in a press release on Wednesday. “I have had the opportunity to collaborate with him in several contexts over the past years and I am confident he will make an excellent Director-General. I am pleased to hand over this important role to him at the end of 2025.”
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Thomson is currently Executive Chairman of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and holds a chair in experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge. He has spent much of his career at CERN, where in the 1990s he initially contributed to precision measurements of the W and Z bosons.
Adapted from French by DeepL/ac
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