New Scientific Director at IPP Garching
4 Feb 2011
On 1 February, 2011, Professor Sibylle Günter took up her new appointment as Scientific Director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching and Greifswald.
She succeeds Günther Hasinger, who had headed IPP since 2008. IPP's research objective is to develop the principles for a fusion power plant.
Sibylle Günter is a professor of theoretical physics and has been with IPP for fourteen years now, latterly as head of the Tokamak Theory Division. Her research field is theoretical plasma physics, her main areas being magnetohydrodynamics and kinetic theory of suprathermal particles.
As new director, she aims to bring the two branches of IPP at Garching and Greifswald even closer together, "in order to ensure jointly the best possible use of the two large-scale experiments, the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak device at Garching and the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, which is to go into operation at Greifswald in 2014. IPP is the only institute in the world equipped to do comparative research on devices of both types, thus enabling it to develop the optimum concept for a power plant—a most exciting objective."