Norbert Holtkamp is a German-American physicist and science administrator. In December 2025, he was appointed the Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), effective January 2026. He previously served as the Deputy Laboratory Director of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, where he led the LCLS-II X-ray laser upgrade project. He also served as Principal Deputy Director-General of the ITER fusion project in France.
Holtkamp also served as a Science Fellow at the Hoover Institution and also as professor of particle physics and astrophysics and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University.
At Stanford, he was SLAC’s deputy laboratory director from 2014 to 2022, leading the conception and implementation of multi-laboratory partnerships for several Department of Energy and National Science Foundation projects. Since 2019 he has led SLAC’s $1.1 billion LCLS-II Free Electron Laser construction project, built by five US national laboratories. He also managed the laboratory’s overall risk portfolio, which included more than $2.5 billion worth of construction on the SLAC site.
In 2006, he was nominated principal deputy director of ITER, an international organization founded in France with seven members—the European Union (through Euratom), China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States—collaborating on a €20 billion project to build the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion devise. From 2001 to 2006, Holtkamp served as the director of the Accelerator Systems Division for the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s most powerful pulsed neutron source, built by a collaboration of six Department of Energy national laboratories. He held various leadership positions on a variety of US and international science infrastructure projects at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany. He chaired the Particle Accelerator Conference in 2005 and the Linac Conference in 2006. In June 2008 he received the Gersh Budker Prize of the European Physical Society.
