AXEL DREES
Distinguished Professor
Physics and Astronomy
axel.drees@stonybrook.edu | (631)-632-8114, Physics C-105 | (631)-632-4366, P-101
Research Group Website
Curriculum Vitae. (Last updated: 2023 Jul 31)

Biography
Axel Drees received his Doctorate 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. Drees continued his research as postdoc and Assistant Professor at Heidelberg before he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University in January of 1998, taking a leading role in the PHENIX experiment.

Drees has held many leadership roles in PHENIX and currently serves as deputy spokesperson of the collaboration. Since he joined Stony Brook University the research of his group has been funded by more than $23M 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.

Drees has served in a variety of leadership roles at Stony Book University. These include Associate Dean for Budget and Operations of CAS from 9/2008 to 4/2012, during this time he served as Acting Dean of CAS in the summer of 2011. He served as Vice Provost for Budget and Strategic Planning from 4/2012 to 5/2015, and as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy from 9/2015 to 8/2023. Since 2018 Drees has been a Member of the University Senate and has chaired the Committee for Academic Planning and Resource Allocation (CAPRA).

Research Statement
At Stony Brook he and his group played a leading role in the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL. 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 future the new state of the art sPHENIX experiment which started data taking in 2023.