PANDA Honorary Lifetime Membership for Prof. Dr. Herbert Löhner

Prof. Dr. Herbert Löhner (Photo: Udo Kurilla/GSI) is active in PANDA since the early days and contributed in a countless number of activities to bring the project forward.

Born in 1947 in Rietberg, Germany, he did his physics studies at the University of Münster and he obtained his PhD in 1978 from that University as well. During his habilitation time he was detached to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US where he worked in the field of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion reactions. In 1988, he started as an associated professor at KVI in Groningen and he became professor in 1993 with a special interest in the field of hadron physics, but also very active in other fields of (applied) physics, such as medical and astroparticle physics. Herbert Löhner is a well-known expert and pusher of state-of-the-art technologies for large-scale experiments. In PANDA, he is well known as one of key players behind the design and readout of the forward end cap of the EMC, a subdetector of PANDA that will likely be the first one completed.
He served in PANDA also in a varietey of committees, boards, as well as in scrutiny and review groups since today and was always focussed to the timely realization of the project with constructive and practical input.

In recognition of his engagement and achievements, the PANDA collaboration awarded to him the "PANDA Honorary Lifetime Membership" for his "Outstanding Service to the PANDA Collaboration and the Field of Hadron Physics".
The certificate and the medal were presented by the PANDA Spokesperson on June 6, 2018 at the Festive Dinner at the recent PANDA Collaboration Meeting in Stockholm. The laudatory speech was given by Johan Messchendorp (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) who has been working with Herbert Löhner since his PhD in a variety of projects.