Adam Maj - Biography#

Adam Maj was born in 1955 in Sidzina village south of Poland. In 1974, he finished the high school in Myslenice. He completed his physics studies (M.Sc.) at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1979, specialising in nuclear physics. He defended his Ph.D. thesis at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków in 1988, and obtained there his habilitation in 2001. He obtained the title of state-nominated Professor from the President of Poland in 2006.

Since 1979, Adam Maj has been employed by the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ-PAN) in Kraków. At the beginning, mainly during his stay at Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin (1982-1984), he pursued experimental studies of the structure of atomic nuclei using methods of gamma-ray, conversion-electron and alpha-particle spectroscopy, as well as performing measurements of magnetic moments of isomeric states. From1989, he started close collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, first as post-doc and later as visiting professor. During this period, he broadened his research interests to include studies of hot rotating nuclei using gamma decay of the isovector giant dipole resonance and later implemented such studies in Kraków. In these investigations, he confirmed existence of the Jacobi shape transition (oblate to very elongated one) in atomic nuclei, as well as the presence of other exotic nuclear shapes. Since 2005 he has been engaged in the RISING and PRESPEC projects at GSI Darmstadt aiming to study properties of exotic nuclei produced in the relativistic fragmentation of heavy ions. He is also deeply involved in the preparation of new scientific projects with radioactive beams from the soon to become available new accelerator complex SPIRAL2 in Caen (France). He initiated and now coordinates a new European project aiming at developing novel detector - PARIS - for high-energy gamma-ray studies. He is co-author of about 260 scientific papers (h-factor=33) and has been supervisor of four successfully promoted Ph.D. students.

Presently, Adam Maj is full professor at IFJ-PAN. He served there for 6 years (2011-2016) as the Scientific Director of IFJ-PAN. He is member of several scientific and programme advisory committees: 1) the IFJ PAN Scientific Advisory Committee, 2) the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Heavy-Ion Laboratory of University of Warsaw (Co-chair), 3) the Scientific Council of GANIL, Caen, 4)the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee (NuPECC), 5) the EURISOL Users Executive Committee, 6) the Programme Advisory Committee of ALTO, IPN Orsay, 7) the NUSTAR Council of GSI-FAIR, Darmstadt, and 8) the Governing Board of the European H2020 ENSAR2 project (elected chair) . From 2015, he represents Poland in the ESS In-kind Review Committee. In 2017, he was elected as chair of the Nuclear Physics Section in the Polish Physical Society.