Pierluigi Campana is an experimental high-energy physicist with extensive experience in the field of particle detectors. His research career began at Frascati National Laboratory of INFN. He participated in the ALEPH experiment at the CERN LEP accelerator and later in the KLOE experiment at DAFNE at LNF. Since 2002, he has been a member of the LHCb collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and served as the spokesperson from 2011 to 2014. In 2015, he was appointed Director of the National Laboratories of Frascati, a position he held until 2020 when he was appointed as a member of the MUR in the INFN Executive Board, a position held until the end of 2023.

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Since 2021, Pierluigi Campana is the Italian Delegate in ESFRI and in January 2024 the leadership of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) has approved his appointment as next Chair of ICFA. He is presently the coordinator of the EuPRAXIA ESFRI and PP projects.
 

Ralph Assmann has obtained his doctorate in Physics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. His PhD research was performed at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich and at CERN in the ALEPH experiment on particle and accelerator physics. From 1994 to 1998 he worked as research associate and staff at Stanford University and SLAC on the SLC, PEP-2 and NLC colliders. He was a Primary Investigators in the E-157 experiment, the first plasma acceleration experiment at SLAC. From 1998 to 2012 he worked at CERN in leading roles on the LEP and LHC colliders, including leadership of the LHC collimation project.

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He was an LHC machine coordinator in run I of the LHC operation, that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. At CERN he also contributed to the approval of the AWAKE plasma acceleration experiment.

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From 2012 to 2023 he was a Leading Scientist for Accelerator R&D at DESY, where he performed research on new, compact accelerators. Projects with leading roles included the EuPRAXIA EU project on an ultra-compact FEL, the ATHENA Helmholtz project, the "Accelerator on a Chip" Moore foundation project, the ERC Synergy Grant AXSIS, the SINBAD facility at DESY and the RF-based X Band TDS with variable polarization POLARIX. He was awarded an ERC Synergy Grant in 2014 and was the Chair of the Accelerator Group in the European Physical Society from 2020 to 2023. 

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In 2021 he joined INFN as coordinator of the Preparatory Phase and ESFRI consortia for the "European Plasma Research Accelerator with eXcellence In Allications" (EuPRAXIA) project. Leader of the EuPRAXIA European Headquarters at Frascati and support for local construction projects on the EuPRAXIA FEL-flagship pillar and plasma-based betatron X ray source Eu-APS at Frascati. 

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Since 2023, Dr Ralph Assmann is Head of the 'Accelerator Operations & Development (ACC)' at GSI/FAIR and will in future manage GSI's existing accelerator facilities and plan the integration and commissioning of FAIR.

Massimo Ferrario is currently Senior Scientist at INFN (Frascati),  Project Leader of the EuPRAXIA@SPARC_LAB facility and chair of the Collaboration Board of the ESFRI project EuPRAXIA. In the last 30 years Massimo has been working in the field of high brightness photoinjectors, free electron lasers and advanced accelerator concepts including plasma accelerators. He is co-chair of the workshops series: “European Advanced Accelerator Concepts” together with Ralph Assmann (GSI/FAIR) since 2013 and of the “The Physics and Applications of High Brightness Beams” together with Prof J. B. Rosenzweig (UCLA) since 2009. He is a member of the CERN Accelerator School (CAS) since 2003 where he has given several lectures about the Physics of High Brightness Beams and Advanced Accelerator Concepts.

 

Massimo Ferrario is also currently teaching “High Brightness Beam Physics” at the University of Roma “La Sapienza” for the Accelerator Physics PhD program.