Prof. Dr. Helmut Koch (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.

He is a driving force in spectroscopy with antiprotons already before the LEAR (Low Energy Antiproton Ring) era when the search for deeply bound proton-antiproton-states, the so called baryonium, was his main field of activity. As the spokesperson of Crystal Barrel at LEAR he led the construction of the detector and shaped the collaboration with his smooth but clear management style. When he moved to the Ruhr-University Bochum, he made this institute the spearhead for PANDA in Germany e.g. by publishing the very first LOI that finally led to the proposal for the FAIR facility as we know it – including the antiproton facility and PANDA. He served in PANDA also in a variety of committees, boards and was always focused 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 November 7, 2018 at the Festive Dinner at the recent PANDA Collaboration Meeting in Darmstadt. The laudatory speech was given by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Wiedner (Ruhr-University Bochum) who has been working with Helmut Koch since decades.

During our collaboration meeting in November this year the collaboration board nominated one candidate for the position of our spokesperson and one candidate for the deputy position.

Spokesperson candidate Klaus Peters, GSI:	Deputy spokesperson candidate Tord Johansson, Uppsala University:
Have a look at his CV	Have a look at his CV

Information on the Procedure

• The Vote on the PANDA Spokesperson and PANDA Deputy Spokesperson takes place electronically in November and December 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 check the PANDA electorate list whether you are in (login required).
• 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. The election is CLOSED and the results will be communicated soon.

  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 via http://www-oracle.gsi.de/pls/gsi/A_ADMIN.p_reset_OID
• Please vote between Nov 7th 2018, 18:00h CET and Dec 16th 2018, 12:00h CET. Before and after that period the link given above will not work.
• You have then accessed the ballot page, where you can mark your vote. You may accept the candidates selected by the Collaboration Board as PANDA Spokespersons or not accept or abstain.
• Your vote is anonymous. You can only vote once.

In case of technical problems contact the PANDA office.

Good news for all PANDAs! The "Expert Committee Experiments" (ECE) of FAIR, which is responsible for the technical review of the FAIR experiments, has recommended two more PANDA Technical Design Reports (TDRs). A TDR describes in detail in which way a detector component will work and shows a way how to build it.

Our list of accepted TDRs has been increased by "Technical Design Report for the PANDA Forward Tracker" and "PANDA Forward Time of Flight detector (FToF wall)" to a total of 11 . A "very big thank you" to all who have worked hard to achieve this: System manager Jerzy Smyrski and the groups in Cracow (AGH, UJ, PK), Darmstadt (GSI), Ferrara (INFN) and Giessen (JLU) for the Forward Tracker, which you can see on the picture with the dark background, and system manager Stan Belostotski and the St Petersburg group (PNPI) for the FToF detector, which is shown on the picture with the white background.
Furthermore, two additional TDRs are at the ECE for review, the Luminosity Detector TDR submitted in spring 2016 and the Endcap Disc DIRC TDR submitted in summer 2018.