First Foreign Research Director to Begin Research at the IBS

– Dr. Yannis K. Semertzidis Joins the KAIST Campus Research Group –

o  The Institute for Basic Science (IBS) announced on October 16, 2013 that 52-year-old Dr. Yannis K. Semertzidis has been hired as an IBS research director.

o      Dr. Semertzidis is the first foreign researcher to be appointed as an IBS research director, having earlier completed a research contract with the institute.

o      Dr. Semertzidis, formerly a tenured researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), was the second research director to be appointed by the IBS in October 2012, in recognition of his outstanding research into precision particle physics and his valuable research into the axion as a dark matter candidate.

o      He will join the IBS KAIST Campus Research Group, which was established after almost a year of negotiations.

o  Dr. Semertzidis will establish the Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research at IBS KAIST Campus, where he will pursue fine particle physics research.

o      The director’s axion research will investigate the origins and structure of the universe; the role of axions after the Big Bang; attempts to detect axions; investigations into the proton electric dipole moment; and development of an axion detector using a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID).

o  Dr. Semertzidis is a world-renowned scholar, recognized for his scientific and technical contributions to measurement analysis in the field of precision particle physics.

o      Dr. Semertzidis’s methods for exploring the axion as a dark matter candidate are expected to contribute greatly to particle physics research. He was unanimously recommended as an IBS research director by the IBS Research Group Selection Evaluation Committee.

o      Born in Greece on September 28, 1961, Dr. Semertzidis received a BS degree from the Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki. He earned his master’s and PhD from the University of Rochester in 1987 and 1989 respectively.

o      His career at BNL began in 1992, where he worked as a researcher, senior researcher, and tenured researcher. He also conducted research at CERN’s particle physics laboratory from 1993 to 1995. In 2005 Dr. Semertzidis received the Science and Technology Award from BNL, and was elected as an American Physics Society Fellow.