A man with many talents

On 1 February this year, Niek Lopes Cardozo was appointed Chair of the Foundation FOM, the Dutch national organization for fundamental physics research, chairing both the Board of Governors and the Executive Board. The Governing Board of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) also appointed him Chair of the Subfield of Physics.

As Professor at Eindhoven, Lopes Cardozo has supervised the PhD dissertations of some 20 young researchers. In addition to teaching and research, Lopes Cardozo has engaged in outreach, particularly to secondary school students. Together with Mark Westra (who later became Head of Commuinications of EFDA and ITER) he developed the Fusion Road Show (the link will direct you to a presentation Niek gave in Veldhoven 2008 together with the US Secretary of State, Stephen Chu.

Lopes Cardozo has also been active in the Dutch Physics Association, serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Dutch Journal of Physics. He represents Dutch fusion research on the top-level management committees of the European Fusion Programme and—up to his recent appointment as Chair of the Dutch physics program—he was Vice Chair of the Governing Board of the European Domestic Agency for ITER Fusion for Energy, of which he is still a member.

He is also co-initiator of ITER-NL, a consortium of Dutch knowledge institutions (TNO, FOM and NRG) which work together to achieve strong Dutch participation in the ITER Project through bridges built between researchers and the Dutch high-tech industrial companies that will be contributing to the construction of ITER. ITER-NL emphasized the role of ITER as a driver of innovation, and in recognition of this, the Dutch government granted ITER-NL earmarked support.