CERN selects new director-general

The CERN Council has chosen British physicist Mark Thomson as the organisation's next director-general. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will make the formal appointment at the December Council session and Thomson's five-year term will begin on January 1, 2026. “Mark Thomson is a talented physicist with great managerial experience,” said current CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti in a press release on Wednesday. “I have had the opportunity to collaborate with him in several contexts over the past years and I am confident he will make an excellent Director-General. I am pleased to hand over this important role to him at the end of 2025.” + Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox Thomson is currently Executive Chairman of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and holds a chair in experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge. He has spent much of his career at CERN, where in the 1990s he initially contributed to ...