Dear PANDA members,
I'm happy to announce the result of our Spokespersons elections.

SP-election Kai Brinkmann:
137 yes (92%)
8 no
4 abstentions

Deputy-SP-election Alfons Khoukaz:
145 yes (97%)
1 no
3 abstentions

Both elected candidates indicated already the acceptance of their appointment.
The term of Kai and Alfons will be 1.07.2025 -- 30.06.2027.

With this great result, let me just say on behalf of the PANDA collaboration:

               CONGRATULATION TO BOTH OF YOU !!!

With best wishes,
Frank

During our online collaboration meeting in May this year the collaboration board endorsed one candidate for the position of our spokesperson and one candidate for the deputy position.

Spokesperson candidate Kai-Thomas Brinkmann, Gießen University:	Deputy spokesperson candidate Alfons Khoukaz, Münster University:
Have a look at his CV and his mission statement	Have a look at his CV and his mission statement

Information on the Procedure

• The Vote on the PANDA Spokesperson and PANDA Deputy Spokesperson takes took place electronically in May/June according to the PANDA Governance Rules.
• The electorate are all official members of PANDA with a university degree and a PANDA membership of at least one year as reported by the institute heads.
• Please note that a quorum of 50% of registered voter has to be reached for the election to be valid.

Instructions for voting

• To vote, access the PANDA Vote form on this site by logging in using your personal GSI web login.

  To the vote. Vote ended!

  If you are not already logged in, follow the link above and you will be asked for your user credentials and on successful login you will be redirected to the ballot page. If you are already logged in, you can access the polls via menu item "Ballot paper" as well.

• If you forgot the password of your GSI web login you will have to get it reset by opening a ticket by email or via http://www-oracle.gsi.de/pls/gsi/A_ADMIN.p_reset_OID (works only within GSI network)
• Please vote between May 19th 2025, 00:00h CEST and June 10th 2025, 24:00h CEST. Before and after that period the link given above will not work.
• You have then accessed the ballot page, where you can could have marked your individual vote for the candidates endorsed by the Collaboration Board (options: accept, non-accept, abstain).
• Your vote is anonymous. You can only vote once.

In case of technical problems contact the PANDA office.

For his doctoral thesis "Unified Study of Spectrum and Properties of Heavy Mesons at Energies below and above Meson-Meson Thresholds" Dr. Roberto Bruschini has received the Panda Theory PhD Prize 2024.

The award was announced at the most recent Panda Collaboration meeting at GSI, Darmstadt and handed over to Dr. Roberto Bruschini (with certificate) by the spokesperson of the Panda Collaboration Prof Klaus Peters (left) and the chair of the Theory Adisory Group Prof Christian Fischer (right), University Giessen, Germany, during a dinner ceremony.

Dr. Bruschini used Coupled-Channel Schrödinger Equations in adiabatic and diabatic forms for Charmonium-like Mesons below and above threshold. The diabatic Born-Oppenheimer approximation allows for a unified study of conventional and exotic charmonium-like mesons, which has a great impact to the PANDA physics program.

The Panda Collaboration awards the Theory PhD Prize to specifically honor students’ contributions related to the Panda project. Candidates for the PhD Prize are nominated by their doctoral advisors. In addition to being directly related to the Panda Experiment, the nominees’ doctoral degrees must have received a rating of “very good” or better. Up to three candidates are shortlisted for the award and can present their dissertations at the Panda Collaboration meeting. The winner is chosen by a committee that is appointed for this task by the Panda Collaboration.

Hannes Zmeskal passed away on July 23, 2024 after a short severe disease. With Hannes we lose an unparalleled experienced researcher in the field of exotic atoms and experimental low-energy hadron physics. His work manifested in many important publications. He was a driving force in experiments on muon/pion experiments and low-energy kaon nuclear physics. His success in acquiring third party funding is remarkable – he was principal investigator in projects of the Austrian Science Fund and in the European research activities like Strong2020.
There is a possibility of expressing condolences online.

I know him since 1980 when I joined a research group at Paul Scherrer Institute (SIN at this time) in Switzerland.  Johann Zmeskal was a specialist of all kind of cryogenic targets and detector systems used in experiments on muon catalyzed fusion, the nuclear  fusion is resulting from the strong binding of 
two deuterons or deuteron-triton using a negatively charged muon which is released after the fusion process with a high probability and can start another fusion cycle. The finding of hyperfine effects in the molecular formation was topic of his PhD work - a big success and it is published in Phys. Rev. A.
He was member of many Collaborations like SIDDHARTA, ASACUSA and PANDA. In the PANDA experiment he contributed to the target system from the beginning but he was also working on the time-of-flight system. Due to his experience in cryogenic and ultrahigh vacuum systems he contributed to low-energy antiproton physics in experiment at the antimatter facility of CERN.
He was a leading figure in the experiments DEAR, SIDDHARTA and SIDDHARTA2 at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of INFN from the beginning of the electron-positron collider DAFNE operation.
Hannes Zmeskal was finally co-spokesperson of the very successful SIDDHARTA2 experiment on kaonic deuterium which is after the kaon-hydrogen experiment a key experiment to study the strong interaction at lowest energies  in an exotic atom with strangeness.
Hannes Zmeskal with his patient, kind and optimistic nature was always a calming pole in any of his many experiments. It has to be highlighted that Hannes was an extremely good mentor for a new generation of researchers.
Loved by all who knew him, he will be missed.

Johann Marton