Stan Bentvelsen reappointed as Director Nikhef
The NWO executive board has reappointed Prof. Stan Bentvelsen for a second term of five years as director of the National Institute for Subatomic Physics Nikhef with effect from 1 December 2019.
The works council issued a positive advice and the university partners of Nikhef unanimously support this reappointment.
Bentvelsen (54) has been a professor at the University of Amsterdam since 2005 and director of Nikhef since 2014. Together with Frank Linde (his predecessor as director of Nikhef), Bentvelsen received the Physica Prize for their contribution to the discovery of the Higgs particle with the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
During his directorship, the institute underwent the SEP evaluation in 2017 and received an outstanding assessment. Nikhef was described as a world leader in particle and astroparticle physics with an outstanding reputation in experimental physics. Under Bentvelsen’s leadership, Nikhef has managed to acquire funding for contributions to international infrastructure such as KM3NeT, XENON, Auger and a test facility of the Einstein telescope. Funds have also been acquired for the renovation of the Nikhef building on the Amsterdam Science Park.
Nikhef is the National Institute of Subatomic Physics. Nikhef is a collaboration between NWO-I, the Institutes Organisation of NWO, and six universities: Radboud University, University of Groningen, University of Amsterdam, Maastricht University, Utrecht University and VU Amsterdam. The institute does research into the elementary building blocks of our universe, their mutual forces and the structure of space and time.