Three new Junior Research Group Leaders

On the first of October, three new Junior Research Group (JRG) Leaders join the Cluster: Professor Dr. Ilka Brunner, Professor Dr. Sebastian Jäger and Professor Dr. Jochen Weller. They will work in the areas of theoretical particle physics and observational astrophysics. 

Prof. Dr. Ilka Brunner, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Jäger, Prof. Dr. Jochen Weller

 Before joining the Cluster, Ilka Brunner has been awarded as “EURYI award holder” (European Young Investigator) at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich. At the Universe Cluster she will lead the JRG on “Extra Dimensions in Particle Physics and Cosmology”. Ilka Brunner’s main research interests include D-branes in Calabi-Yau Compactifications and “Orientifolds”, which provide a description of unoriented strings.

Sebastian Jäger, leader of the JRG “New Physics beyond the Standard model”, is already familiar with the Cluster’s environment. He received his PhD from TUM and for the last two years worked as a Postdoc at LMU’s Arnold Sommerfeld Center and as a Fellow at CERN. At the Cluster, Jäger will continue and extend his research on the limitations of the Standard Model, including how virtual effects of new particles beyond it may manifest themselves in experiments at the CERN LHC and elsewhere.

Last but not least: Jochen Weller. He spent the last four years as a lecturer at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University College London. Weller will be the leader of the JRG “Observational Astrophysics” and will focus, among others, on the research issues of Dark Energy, Modified Gravity, Galaxy Clusters and the Cosmic Microwave Background.