Raimond Snellings - Biography#

Raimond Snellings is a professor at Utrecht University. He works on Quantum Chromo Dynamics at high temperatures and tries to understand the properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma. He was one of the first to point out the importance of anisotropic flow at RHIC, which resulted in many high impact publications. He was a primary author, together with two colleagues, of the paper that reported on the first measurement of elliptic flow at RHIC. This paper (cited over 600 times) provided the basis for the discovery of the perfect liquid behavior of the produced medium. He was also a primary author for the experimental paper from STAR summarizing the evidence for QGP formation (cited more than 2000 times).

As one of the world experts on the topic of anisotropic flow, his group played a leading role in the flow and correlation analysis of ALICE. In particular his group has, in large part, developed and implemented the sophisticated statistical techniques that are needed for a reliable measurement of flow. This four-year long effort resulted in the first heavy-ion physics publication at the LHC, a few days after the data became available. This publication received an editor’s selection in Physical Review Letters and was also selected by the American Physical Society for a commentary in Physics, a distinction that APS reserves for its most important papers. This paper is the most cited ALICE physics paper and, currently cited over 500 times.

In ALICE he is the convenor of one of the physics working groups (correlations and fluctuations) and a member of the physics and editorial board. He is leading the Dutch hardware effort in ALICE for the future silicon tracker, this program was recently approved and funded by NWO. He is the FOM program leader of the Dutch ALICE program (for which he applied and received guaranteed funding for his whole group currently up to 2021) and at Utrecht University he is a full professor, the director of the master experimental physics and the vice-chair of the institute of Subatomic Physics. He is chairing at the University the research IT committee 2020 which aims to define the IT program and infrastructure for the whole university. At Nikhef he is chairing the national research school of nuclear physics, which coordinates the educational program of graduate and masters students in particle and astroparticle physics. This school is a collaboration of Nikhef and four Dutch universities. He was awarded for his research in ALICE a NWO Vidi and Vici in 2005 and 2011, respectively.

He is involved in the reviews of physics funding proposals in the Netherlands, the United States, Belgium and Poland. He was invited to actively contribute to the last two long range plans of Nuclear Physics in the United states, and in Europe he was a committee member for the NuPECC long range plan of nuclear physics in 2010 and he is currently a NuPECC liaison for the 2016 long range plan.