Lia Merminga | |
|---|---|
| Born | Nikolitsa Merminga |
| Nationality | Greece, United States, Canada |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Known for | Accelerator Physics |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility TRIUMF Fermilab |
| Doctoral advisor | Lawrence W. Jones, Donald A. Edwards |
Nikolitsa (Lia) Merminga is a Greek-born accelerator physicist. In 2022, she was appointed director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the first woman to hold the position.[1] She has worked at other national laboratories in Canada and the United States.
Merminga grew up in Greece, where she attended all-girl middle and high schools. By the time she was sixteen years old, she knew she wanted to be a physicist, having been inspired by her family members, a high school physics teacher, and a biography of Marie Curie.[2][3][4] She received her undergraduate degree from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where she studied physics, in 1983. She then moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in physics at the University of Michigan. There, she completed a Master’s of Science in Physics and a Master’s of Science in Mathematics and worked with doctoral advisors Lawrence W. Jones and Donald A. Edwards.[5][3][4] She completed her thesis, A Study of Nonlinear Dynamics in the Fermilab Tevatron,[6] using data from Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator[2] and completed her PhD in 1989.[5]
After completing her PhD, Merminga held a postdoctoral position at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the accelerator theory group.[5][3] In 1992, she joined Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility as a member of the Center for Advanced Studies of Accelerators (CASA). In 2002, she became director of CASA's beam physics group, her first managerial position.[5][3] In 2008, she joined Canada's TRIUMF laboratory as head of their accelerator program,[5][3] one of the most senior scientific positions in Canada.[7] There, she oversaw the design and construction of an accelerator that produced rare isotopes for use in medicine and nuclear physics.[3] She returned to SLAC in 2015, when she became that lab's Associate Director for Accelerators and a professor at Stanford University.[4] Around the same time, she took on another leadership role as a member of the U.S. Department of Energy's inaugural Energy Sciences Leadership Group from 2016 to 2017.[8] Merminga returned to Fermilab in 2018 as director of the lab's Proton Improvement Plan II (PIP-II) project,[2] the first particle accelerator project with major contributions by other countries to be hosted in the United States.[9]
On 5 April 2022, it was announced that Merminga had been appointed as the next director of Fermilab.[10]