Quick Facts
Biography
Horst Wenninger is a German physicist.
Life and career
Wenninger spent 35 years at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) starting as a participant to the Bubble Chamber experiments in the 1960s, a period of time that he was also assisting work at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the University of Heidelberg.
In 1968 he joined the BEBC project and worked on bubble chamber physics until 1984 when the project was eventually terminated. During these 20 years in the BEBC team, Wenninger successfully undertook key roles such as the BEBC coordinator and BEBC group leader.
In 1984 he became Leader of the Experimental Physics Facilities (EF) Division and 6 years later Leader of the new Accelerator Technologies (AT) Division, both in CERN.
Wenninger's enthusiasm for physics positioned him in the core of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project preparations in 1993, acting as the Deputy Project Leader. He was there when the project got approved by the CERN Council in 1996 for the contribution to which Wenninger was then appointed Research-Technical Director.
He retired from CERN in September 2003.
During his last years of career he also took active part in the TESLA collaboration, which was merged into the International Linear Collider project.
Wenninger is a member of many scientific boards.