Rolf-Dieter Heuer. Credit: CERN

The next director-general of CERN, Europe's primary high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will be Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who will take the reins in January 2009.

Heuer, whose appointment was announced on 14 December by the CERN Council, is currently a research director at Germany's DESY laboratory in Hamburg. He will replace Robert Aymar, who has run the laboratory since 2004.

Heuer says his top priority will be to ensure a smooth transition from the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, a SFr10-billion (US$8.7-billion) particle accelerator to its operation after it is completed. Heuer also says that he will seek to improve cooperation with particle-physics laboratories in the United States and Japan.

He adds that he will ?keep options open? for CERN's future, including its participation in the International Linear Collider, a proposed next generation of particle accelerator.