Chris Van Den Broeck appointed Scientific Director of GRASP

Chris Van Den Broeck has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute for Gravitational and Subatomic Physics. He succeeds Raimond Snellings, who served as Scientific Director of the institute since September 2019.

It is a privilege to help give direction to an interdisciplinary institute such as GRASP, where the most extreme states of matter and the fundamental properties of spacetime are linked together.

In this new role, Chris will continue to foster research into the behavior of bulk nuclear matter by using all available experimental and observational channels: Heavy ion collisions as studied with the ALICE detector on the Large Hadron Collider, and gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars, as well as other astrophysical information.

He is looking forward to help meet the challenges related to the involvement of GRASP in large international projects - ALICE, LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA, Einstein Telescope, and LISA – which are all entering into a new phase of exciting scientific development.

Additionally he aims to build new connections at the Dutch national level, and locally within the Department of Physics. At GRASP, research and education go hand in hand; Chris also aims to strengthen the latter, and to further link it with other aspects of the Department’s educational program.