Farewell lecture Felicitas Pauss
Particle Physics (IPA)
Professor Felicitas Pauss, since 1991 a member of the Institute for Particle Physics, gave her farewell lecture, entitled "Tiny particles, big questions, multifaceted experience".
Felicitas Pauss obtained her PhD in theoretical physics and mathematics at the University of Graz (Austria) in 1976. In 1978 she assumed a position at the Max Planck Institute in Munich (Germany) and moved to the field of experimental particle physics. She continued her research at Cornell University (USA) and CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) before joining ETH Zurich in 1991, where she was elected professor in 1993. From 1997 to 2007, she directed the Institute for Particle Physics at ETH and from January 2009 to March 2013 she was in charge of CERN’s International Relations, reducing her ETH employment to 20%. In April 2013 she resumed her activities at ETH and took up the function of adviser to the ETH president on international affairs. In June 2013 she was elected president of the Faculty Conference of ETH Zurich.
Besides lecturing at the undergraduate and graduate level at ETH Zurich, her research activities focus on two main research fields: particle physics at the high-energy frontier and astroparticle physics, addressing fundamental open questions about the structure of the Universe and the underlying mechanisms that govern its evolution.
She has been member of the CMS collaboration at CERN since the early 1990s and also fulfilled important management duties within CMS. She has strongly contributed to the design and construction of the CMS experiment, one of the two large experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the Higgs Boson has been discovered. This discovery was recognised as important experimental input for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. Felicitas Pauss has published close to 1000 scientific papers, and gave more than 450 talks at international conferences, colloquia and seminars as well as presentations for government officials, funding agencies and the general public.
Felicitas Pauss has served and still serves on numerous national and international scientific advisory boards and in evaluation panels. She has received the "Grand Decoration of Honour" of the Federal Province of Styria (Austria), the “Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class” of the Republic of Austria and a honorary doctorate from the Technical University Vienna, and she was awarded the Erna Hamburger prize of the EPFL-WISH foundation. She is member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina.