Particle physicist Joachim Mnich (born in 1959, German) was Research Director at the German national laboratory DESY before being appointed as CERN’s Director for Research and Computing.

Joachim Mnich is an expert in both electroweak physics and detector development at e+e- and hadron colliders and has many years of experience working in science management. He is the third member of the CERN Directorate in a row to be recruited from DESY, where he had been Research Director for twelve years.

Mnich studied electrical engineering and physics at RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) Aachen University and completed his PhD in physics in 1987, working on the Mark-J experiment at DESY.

He then came to CERN to join the L3 collaboration at the LHC’s predecessor, LEP, working on the tracking chamber and the determination of Z parameters, as well as serving as L3 analysis coordinator. When he became a university professor in Aachen in 2000 he joined the CMS experiment to work on the construction of the silicon tracker and the preparation for Standard Model measurements.

In 2005, Mnich was called to Hamburg to join the DESY research centre as Lead Scientist and professor at the University of Hamburg. Here, he led the CMS group at DESY and coordinated an EU project called EUDET for the development of future detector technologies. When then DESY Research Director Rolf Heuer became CERN Director-General in 2009, Mnich took over his role.

Mnich is a member and chair of many international committees and was Chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) from 2015 to 2017.

Mnich succeeded Eckhard Elsen as Director for Research and Computing in January 2021.