As the new chair of the ILC Steering Committee (ILCSC), Enzo Iarocci will have to do a lot of negotiating. Not only with the other members of the Steering Committee or the ILC community, but most of all with his wife. “In this new position I will have to probably travel even more than I thought,” he says, “and my wife is less than pleased about that...”

Shin-ichi Kurokawa (left), former ILCSC chair, introduces his successor, Enzo Iarocci (centre) and the ILC Research Director Sakue Yamada (right).

During last week's ALCPG meeting, Iarocci officially replaced Shin-ichi Kurokawa, who had been chairman for the last two years. The ceremonial hand over occurred on the very same day that the new Research Director Sakue Yamada took up office as well. For the new engineering design phase that also officially began last week, the Steering Committee has lined up a number of plans and changes that Iarocci presented in his speech at ALCPG. One of the first measures will be setting up a Project Advisory Committee that will advise on both accelerator and detector matters. The mandate of this new committee was approved at the ILCSC meeting last week and will be up on their website soon. It will have nine members - "an issue of trinity," smiles Iarocci. Three of the nine will be former Machine Advisory Committee members (just like the Change Control Board the MAC ceased to exist with the finalisation of the RDR), three will be accelerator experts who had not served on the MAC before, and three detector experts will round off the group of advisers.

The ILCSC is also working on the exact wording of the Memorandum of Understanding that will mark the new phase. A standard document to be signed by Barry Barish for the GDE on one side and by a national lab, institution, funding agency or university, the memorandum will be the formal instrument that will help in setting up new collaborations for the EDR phase. “We are still working on a couple of details, but the signing could begin as soon as anybody is interested,” says Iarocci.

Enzo Iarocci is well known within the community. His latest "job" was chair of the CERN Council, before which he was president of the Italian particle physics funding agency, INFN, and director of the INFN laboratory in Frascati. An astroparticle physicist by training, he was co-spokesman of the Italian-US experiment MACRO, housed in the Gran Sasso laboratory to search for magnetic monopoles, in the 1980s, and shared the job with no other than current GDE Director Barry Barish.

The ILCSC is a sub-committee of the International Committee for Future Accelerators ICFA. It coordinates the ILC design effort and reports to and works closely with both ÌCFA and the Funding Agencies for Large Colliders (FALC). It has 16 members - the directors of all major particle physics laboratories around the world and further representatives of each region. The new Project Advisory Committee will report to it, as does the World Wide Study group for detectors and the research director, who is about to form his own advisory panel called the International Detector Advisory Group.

-- Barbara Warmbein