High-energy physicist Marcel Merk of Nikhef has been appointed a member of the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen. Merk was recently installed, the KHMW announced.
Merk is professor of particle physics at the Free University and Maastricht University and is program leader of the LHCb experiment at Nikhef. The Hollandsche Maatschappij is a society in Haarlem that has traditionally bridged science and society since 1752.
The Maatschappij has traditionally been dedicated to awarding prizes for scientific achievements, providing jurors from its membership of 550 professors. There are also 200 non-scientific members, the so-called directors. King Willem Alexander is patron.
Marcel Merk is an experimental physicist and directs the LHCb program at Nikhef. LHCb is one of the large detector experiments at CERN. LHCb essentially studies possible differences between matter and antimatter using the colliding protons at the LHC accelerator in Geneva.
For several years he has also been a professor at Maastricht University, where a new faculty of natural sciences is being built with a strong physics department. In Maastricht, particle physics is an important theme in addition to the detection of gravitational waves.
Maastricht University joined as Nikhef’s sixth university partner in 2019. A year later, in 2020 the university officially joined LHCb.
