Axel Drees

Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences,
SUNY Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Axel Drees, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, was named  interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences on June 22, 2023.

Drees has served in a variety of leadership roles at Stony Book. These include Associate Dean for Budget and Operations of CAS from 2008 to 2012, during which time he also served as Acting Dean of CAS in the summer of 2011. He has also held roles as Vice Provost for Budget and Strategic Planning and as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Since 2018, Drees has been a member of the University Senate and has chaired the Committee for Academic Planning and Resource Allocation (CAPRA).

Drees received his PhD from Heidelberg University in 1989 for pioneering work on experiments seeking to create the quark gluon plasma (QGP), which is a state of hot and dense nuclear matter in which proton and neutrons melt into their substructure and which was the primary form of matter in the universe for the first 10-6 seconds. He continued his research as postdoc and Assistant Professor at Heidelberg before he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University in January 1998. At Stony Brook, he and his group played a leading role in the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His work contributed to the discovery that QGP can indeed be formed in the laboratory.

Drees and his group now focus on characterizing the properties of the QGP using the PHENIX experiment and in the future the new state of the art sPHENIX experiment, which started data taking in 2023. Drees has held many leadership roles in PHENIX and currently serves as deputy spokesperson of the collaboration. Since he joined Stony Brook, the research of his group has been funded by more than $23 million through the Department of Energy (DOE). Over his career he has published more than 300 papers, which have been cited more than 30,000 times, resulting in an h-index of over 100. 

 

CONTACT:

AnnaMaria Gounaris
Assistant to the Dean
631.632.6976
College of Arts and Sciences
Melville Library E-3320
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3391