Prof. Claudio Faccenna will take over as Head of the Section "Dynamics of the Lithosphere" at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on September 1. He succeeds Prof. Onno Oncken, who will retire as section head at the end of the month. Claudio Faccenna is one of the leading international scientists in the field of geodynamics with a focus on active tectonics. His research aims at combining the observation and quantification of the deformation of the lithosphere with the modeling of these processes using both numerical techniques and experimental methods in the laboratory. In particular, Prof. Faccenna plays a leading role in researching questions on the dynamics of the Earth's surface and its control by endogenous processes of the Earth's interior.

The Italian scientist studied at the Sapienza, Università di Roma, where he also received his PhD. Other career moves have taken him to Paris and Rennes in France, and to Harvard and Austin in the United States. He holds a professorship at Università Roma TRE and until his start at the GFZ a chair – the John F. and Carolyn C. Bookout Endowed Chair – in structural geology at the University of Texas at Austin. Faccenna has long been associated with the GFZ. He was a member of the GFZ's international Scientific Advisory Council in 2019 and 2020, and in 2015 and 2016 he completed research stays in Potsdam as part of a Humboldt Professorship, both times in the section of Onno Oncken. Important stations of his fieldwork were in North Africa and the Middle East, the Himalayas and Antarctica.

The previous head of the section, Onno Oncken, has held senior positions at the GFZ since the founding of the German Research Centre for Geosciences. He started in 1992 as Head of the Section "Structure, Evolution and Geodynamics" as it was called then and acted as Department Director from 2003 to 2018. From 2004 to the end of 2020, Onno Oncken was also program spokesperson at the GFZ for three funding periods of the program-oriented research funding (PoF) in the Helmholtz Association. He has been a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin since 1994. The multi-award-winning researcher and South America expert will remain with the GFZ as a visiting scientist.