This page contains archived content on a former member of the Jefferson Lab leadership team.
Dr. Christoph Leemann
Former Director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Director Emeritus
The work and ingenuity of JLab founders, staff, and users had created a world-wide unique facility that produced beautiful and exciting physics and served the Nation as a resource in key technologies. The overarching goal for Dr. Christoph Leemann's tenure as Director was to maximize the scientific output of the Lab, to position it for a bright and vibrant future, and to advance it as a place where talented people would thrive and produce their best.
Dr. Christoph Leemann was the Director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), a U.S. Department of Energy nuclear physics research facility in Newport News, Virginia. As Director, Dr. Leemann was responsible for ensuring funding for the Lab and setting policy and program direction. He also oversaw the delivery of the Lab program and ensured that Jefferson Lab complied with all applicable contract requirements, regulations, and laws. Dr. Leemann was responsible for developing and ensuring excellent relationships with all JLab stakeholders.
Previous positions at Jefferson Lab included Interim Director, Deputy Director, and Associate Director of the Accelerator Division. Before coming to Jefferson Lab in 1985, he had served as Deputy Leader of the Advanced Accelerator Studies Group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL).
Dr. Leemann was internationally recognized in the field of accelerator physics. As Associate Director and Accelerator Division Head at Jefferson Lab beginning in 1985, he had personal responsibility for all aspects of accelerator construction, commissioning, and operation. To this end, Dr. Leemann led and managed a multi-disciplinary team of more than 250 scientists, engineers, software specialists, and technicians in a multifaceted high-tech environment involving forefront electronics, superconductivity, surface science, cryogenics, and computer process control applications. Under his leadership, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility was designed, constructed, and commissioned on time and on budget, leading to technology that became the basis for the world's most powerful tunable laser. As Deputy Leader of the Advanced Accelerator Studies Group at LBL, his group contributed to the development of the Superconducting Super Collider Reference Designs Study. Earlier in his career, he had contributed to the development of the conversion of the Bevatron to heavy ion operation, wrote seminal studies for relativistic heavy ion colliders, and participated in the start-up of stochastic cooling studies. Dr. Leemann had published extensively on nuclear physics and on high-energy and heavy-ion accelerators.
He was appointed a Governor's Distinguished CEBAF Professor at the University of Virginia in July 1985.
His membership in professional organizations included the American Physical Society, where he was a Fellow, and had served on the Executive Committee of the APS Division of Physics of Beams. In addition, Dr. Leemann served or had served on various professional committees such as the Department of Energy Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, Spallation Neutron Source Concept Optimization Committee, Muon Collider Technical Advisory Committee, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Machine Advisory Committee, ICFA Subpanel on Beam Dynamics, Particle Accelerator Conference Program and Organizing committees, Linear Accelerator Conference Committee, and Rare-Isotope Accelerator (RIA) facility design committee.
A native of Basel, Switzerland, he held a Ph.D. in Experimental Nuclear Physics from the Universitat Basel in Switzerland.