Biography

Herwig Schopper was born on February 28, 1924 in Lanakroun, Czechoslovakia. He died on August 19, 2025 in Hamburg, Germany.

In 1981, when Schopper took the helm of the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), he first had to tackle the basics: money. He restructured the laboratory's financial system by introducing a fixed annual budget and funding experiments through member countries. He was also the organisation's first director general, assuming the workload of what had been two separate positions.