Ingrid-Maria Gregor leads the ATLAS group at DESY and is a specialist in detector development, especially silicon tracking detectors. Her group is responsible for producing an endcap for the silicon tracking detector of the upgrade ATLAS experiment for the start of the High-Luminosity LHC. She is also a professor for detector physics at Universität Bonn.

Throughout her scientific career, Ingrid Gregor has been working in large international particle physics collaborations such as DELPHI at LEP and ATLAS at LHC, both based at CERN as well as HERMES and ZEUS at HERA (DESY). In these experiments, she is fascinated about the actual instruments to detect the particles (sensors), the complex detector systems and how to reconstruct particle physics events from the data taken. In all collaborations, she has carried responsibilities in significant parts of detector development, construction and operation. 

After doing her PhD in ATLAS, she worked for the HERA experiments HERMES developing and constructing the Recoil Detector for the final phase of the operation of the HERMES experiment. When moving to a different sector of the HERA ring to the ZEUS experiment she became the ZEUS calorimeter coordinator. At the same time she started the development of a high-resolution pixel beam telescope being used at test beams to study newly developed detectors. By now seven copies of the pixel telescopes can be used at the test beams at DESY, CERN and SLAC. 

After re-joining the ATLAS collaboration she is now leading the ATLAS group at DESY which is working on operation, data analysis, and is one of the largest groups in the international ATLAS collaboration. It is also heavily involved in preparing ATLAS for the luminosity upgrade of the LHC. 

Additionally, she is working on generic R&D to develop next generation silicon tracking detectors for future particle physics tracking detectors. New pixel detectors which are thinner, faster and have a much better spatial resolution are the goal of this work. 

Ingrid Gregor is currently the chair of the Scientific Committee at DESY, a committee advising the DESY directorate in strategic questions around research at DESY.

Academic career

Awards, memberships and roles