Hans Joachim Specht: Scientist and Visionary

Jurgen Schukraft received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1983 under the supervision of Prof. H.J. Specht. Joining CERN in 1984, he worked on proton-proton collisions at the ISR and later heavy-ion experiments at the SPS and Brookhaven’s AGS. A founding member of the ALICE experiment at the LHC, he served as its first spokesperson from 1991 to 2010. After his retirement from CERN in 2018, he held a distinguished professorship at CCNU Wuhan and is currently an adjunct professor at Yale University and an affiliated professor at the Niels Bohr Institute.

Volker Metag studied physics at TU Berlin and the University of Heidelberg where he received his Ph.D. in 1970. He held postdoc positions at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, at the Niels-Bohr-Institute, Copenhagen (Denmark), and at the University of Washington, Seattle (USA). From 1982 until his retirement in 2012 he was a professor for experimental physics at the University of Giessen. His research field is hadron and nuclear physics. He is a member of several international research collaborations and has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and as a co-editor of Physics Letters B. From 1993 to 1998, he was a research director of GSI, Darmstadt, and was involved in the preparation of the FAIR project.

Sanja Damjanovic received her Ph.D. in high-energy nuclear physics from the University of Heidelberg in 2002 under the supervision of a professor Hans J. Specht. Since 1999 she was embedded in international teams and ever since worked at CERN in Geneva and at GSI-FAIR in Darmstadt. Beyond her scientific career, she served as the minister of Science of Montenegro (2016-2020). In 2017, she initiated and led the establishment of SEEIIST, a pan-European research infrastructure for cancer therapy and research, bringing together 10 South East European countries under the mission of Science Diplomacy. She served as the first chairperson of its Steering Committee (2018-2021) and has held a permanent position at GSI since 2021.