Jim Virdee, the new spokesperson of CMS

On 21 June Tejinder 'Jim'Virdee was elected by the CMS collaboration as its new spokesperson, his 3-year term of office beginning in January 2007. He will take over from Michel Della Negra, who has been CMS spokesperson since its formalization in 1992.

Three distinguished physicists stood as candidates for this election: Dan Green from Fermilab, programme manager of the US-CMS collaboration and coordinator of the CMS Hadron Calorimeter project; Jim Virdee from Imperial College London and CERN, deputy spokesperson of CMS since 1993; Gigi Rolandi from the University of Trieste and CERN, ex-Aleph spokesperson and currently involved in the preparations of the physics analyses to be done with CMS. On the early evening of 21 June, 141 of the 142 members of the CMS collaboration board, some represented by proxies, took part in a secret ballot. After two rounds of voting Jim Virdee was elected as spokesperson with a clear majority. Jim thanked the CMS collaboration 'for putting confidence' in him to steer CMS through the transition from construction to data-taking to first physics in 2008.