As of today, Prof. Dr. Albrecht Wagner (58), Professor of Experimental Physics at Hamburg University and former Research Director takes over as Chairman of the Directorate of the German Electron Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg. He succeeds Prof. Dr. Bjørn H. Wiik, who died in a tragic accident on February 26, during his sixth year at the head of the research center.

Following his physics studies at the Technical University in Munich and the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg, where he graduated, Albrecht Wagner became a research associate at Heidelberg University and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. From 1974 to 1986, he carried out his scientific work with experiments at DESY's storage rings DORIS and PETRA, and at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics CERN near Geneva in1989-90. In May 1984 he became a Full Professor of Experimental Physics at Heidelberg University, in June 1991 he accepted a Chair at the University of Hamburg. During that same year, he was offered the direction of DESY's Research department - a position which he has been in charge of for his second term until today. His research work focuses on the investigation of elementary particles and their properties, especially in collisions of electrons with their antiparticles, the positrons, as well as on the planning and development of the detectors used to record these collisions. Thus, Albrecht Wagner has been involved in the planning, construction and operation of the OPAL experiment at CERN's LEP storage ring since 1982. Since 1991, he has also focused on the physics at electron-positron linear colliders - high energy particle accelerators of the next generation like DESY's planned TESLA facility.

During the last years, Professor Wagner has exercised various functions as scientific counselor, e.g. for the German Federal Ministry of Research, the research center CERN, the American accelerator project SSC, the Research Center Karlsruhe, the Heavy-Ion Research Institute GSI in Darmstadt, and the ELSA project in Bonn. Presently, he is a member of the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee NuPECC, the Scientific Committee of the Laboratori Nationali di Frascati, Italy, the Scientific Policy Committee for the State Scientific and Technology Program "Fundamental Nuclear Physics" in Moscow, Russia, and the Lepton Collider Advisory Committee of the Japanese Organization for High Energy Physics KEK. Albrecht Wagner has been appointed "Fellow" of the American Physical Society APS in 1994.