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.

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.

​

Since 2012 he is a Leading Scientist for Accelerator R&D at DESY, where he is performing research on new, compact accelerators. 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. He is presently the coordinator of the EuPRAXIA ESFRI and PP projects.

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 Dr R. Assmann (DESY/INFN) 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. He is also currently teaching “High Brightness Beam Physics” at the University of Roma “La Sapienza” for the Accelerator Physics PhD program.