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Axel Drees
Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Axel Drees

A distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astonomy, Axel 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, Axel 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. Axel 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.  

Axel 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). Throughout his career, Axel has published more than 300 papers, which have been cited more than 30,000 times, resulting in an h-index of over 100. 

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