Beate Heinemann

Chairperson of the DESY Board of Directors

Beate Heinemann has headed the DESY research centre as the first female Chairperson of the DESY Board of Directors since April 2025. Prior to this, she was the first female director of DESY's particle physics research division from February 2022.

In 2024, Beate Heinemann received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Zurich. She has been a professor at the University of Hamburg since 2023 and is a senior scientist in the Quantum Universe Cluster of Excellence. In 2017, she became a Leading Scientist at DESY and Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Freiburg.

At the beginning of her career, Beate Heinemann worked on the CDF experiment at Fermilab as well as on ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - first as a researcher at the University of Liverpool (UK) and later at the University of California, Berkeley (USA).

In 2012, Beate Heinemann was involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson. She completed her doctorate on the H1 experiment at DESY's particle accelerator HERA.