German physicist Rolf-Dieter Heuer has been appointed as the next Director General of CERN. His mandate will begin on 1 January 2009, and will last for five years. Heuer is currently research director for particle and astroparticle physics at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany.
ICTP and CERN have always enjoyed a fruitful collaboration from their early years (see News from ICTP, Winter 2006-2007, No. 119, p. 7).