The Director of the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Rolf Heuer, will visit Asturias on February 27, invited by the Niemeyer Center. His visit is framed within a series of activities aimed at popularizing science and technique, inside the cycle of Debates and Conferences organized by the cultural center of Avilés.

The activities will begin at 12:00 with a conference at the Main Hall of the University of Oviedo. In his meeting the Asturian community, the German physicist will speak about the "CERN: Global science with an European flavor". Professor Javier Cuevas, director of the research group of Experimental Physics of Higher Energies, will be in charge of introducing the highest representative of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics. Cuevas has been collaborating with the research carried out by the CERN for more than two decades, which have resulted in the discovery of what could finally be the Higgs boson (popularly known as the "God particle"), recognized by Science as the greatest discovery of 2012, and by the scientific community as the most important achievement of the last few decades.

During the afternoon, at 17:30, the General Director of the CERN will visit the ITMA Foundation Materials Technology at their premises in the Principality of Asturias Business Park in Avilés. The entity is a technological center that researches new materials, their implications for the industry and the improvement of the technological processes of production in the fields of photovoltaic energies and solar concentrators.

In the Niemeyer Center, Rolf Heuer will offer a conference, open to the general public, on the Large Hadron Collider, world's largest particle accelerator. The act will start at 20:00 at the Dome of the cultural center of Avilés. The audience will be able to attend the conference free of charge, until the capacity has been filled, and the invitations may be obtained at the reception desks of both the Niemeyer Center and of the Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura in Gijón.

Moreover, on February 28, Heuer will take advantage of his stay and will meet in the Polytechnic School of Engineering of Gijón with students and Asturian companies that provide the CERN with products and services, or ones that could potentially establish a relation with this European organization.

Rolf Heuer and the CERN

Professor Rolf Heuer has been General Director of CERN since January 2009. PhD by the University of Heidelberg in 1977, most of his scientific career has been focused on the study of electron-positron reactions, the development of experimental techniques, as well as the construction and operation of the large scale systems of detection. From 1984 to 1998, he was a member of the CERN, working for the OPAL experiment in the electron-positron containment ring of the LEP (Large Electron-Positron Collider, currently replaced by the LHC, Large Hadron Collider). During his 15 years in the CERN, Professor Heuer took the highest directive ranks in the OPAL experiment, being its spokesperson from 1994 to 1998. In 1998, he was given a professorship in the University of Hamburg. It was there where a research group was created to prepare experiments in a lineal electron-positron collider, which rapidly became one of the leading groups in the world for this field.

From 2004 to 2008, Professor Heuer was director of research of particle and astroparticles physics in the DESY laboratory. Furthermore, he has been a member of several scientific committees and consultation organs, where he acquired a great deal of experience in the revision of projects, as well as in the evaluation and promotion of people. He has been given honorary degrees in Doctor of Science by several European and Canadian universities.

The European Association for Nuclear Research is one of the largest and most respected centers of scientific research in the world. Its focus is fundamental physics: it aims at knowing what the universe is made of, and how it works. At the CERN, the most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter—the fundamental particles. Studying what happens when these particles collide allows scientists to learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments utilized by the CERN are detectors and particle accelerators. The accelerators move beams of particles at high energies before making them collide with each other o with stationary objects. The detectors monitor and register the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory is located in the border between France and Switzerland, near Geneva. It was one of the first European joint enterprises, and it currently has 20 member States.