New associate director of the Office of High Energy Physics

Jim Siegrist

The Department of Energy has announced the appointment of Jim Siegrist as the new associate director of the Office of Science for the Office of High Energy Physics on Sept. 19. Siegrist's appointment will go into effect on Oct. 1.

"We have a lot of exciting results coming up soon," said Siegrist, mentioning Fermilab's move toward the Intensity Frontier. "There will be quite a few technical developments that will change the direction of the program." According to Pat Dehmer, the Office of Science deputy director for science programs, Siegrist will be responsible for strategic program planning for high-energy physics, budget formulation and execution, program integration with other Office of Science activities and with the DOE technology offices, and interagency integrations. With an annual budget of almost $800 million, the Office of High-Energy Physics is the nation's leading supporter of fundamental research and facilities for particle physics.

Siegrist joins the Office of High Energy Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). For the past 15 years, Siegrist was the Director of the LBNL Physics Division and for the past 12 years the Associate Laboratory Director for General Sciences, which encompasses the Physics, Nuclear Science, Accelerator and Fusion Research and Engineering Divisions. He has been a member of the UC Berkely Physics Department faculty since 1988.

"I am very appreciative that Jim is taking this important position during these challenging times," said Fermilab director Pier Oddone. "I think he will be great for our field."

Under Siegrist's leadership, LBNL physicists and engineers led the development and fabrication of the 80-million-channel pixel detector of the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment, of which he is a member. Siegrist also maintained LBNL's leading positions in the DZero and CDF experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron. As a CDF collaborator for over 20 years, Siegrist contributed to the development of hardware, software and data analysis for the CDF experiment.

In neutrino physics, Siegrist brought together the Physics, Nuclear Science, and Engineering Divisions to pursue the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation. He has championed underground science facilities for investigating neutrinos and searching for dark matter.

Under Siegrist's leadership, the study of dark energy at LBNL has grown to include new supernova studies and new research methods, including baryon acoustic oscillation and weak gravitational lensing.