Siegfried Glenzer, Director of the High Energy Density Science (HEDS) division at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Professor of Photon Science at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA USA is recognized for his visionary leadership in advancing critical capabilities enabling ignition at the National Ignition Facility, his pioneering contributions to fundamental scientific understanding, and his transformative impact on mentoring and training the next generation of leaders in High Energy Density Science and Inertial Confinement Fusion. Siegfried completed his PhD at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany in 1994. He joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a postdoctoral scientist in 1995 where he became plasma physics group leader and campaign leader for the first inertial confinement fusion experiments on the National Ignition Facility. He joined the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory as a distinguished scientist in 2013 where he developed a new science program to support a new division researching high-energy density physics. In 2015 he joined the SLAC faculty and became the director of the HEDS program.

Siegfried was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2001 for the development of Thomson Scattering for the diagnostics of high-temperature fusion plasmas and for important contributions to understanding of plasma waves, atomic physics, and hydrodynamics of hot dense plasmas. Siegfried is the individual recipient of the APS “Excellence in Plasma Physics” Award (2003), and he received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 2013 for seminal development of Thomson X-ray scattering as an in situ microscopic characterization technique of dense plasma, and for its use to advance fundamental understanding in high energy density physics. In 2019, he was recognized with the honorable Ph.D. from the University of Rostock at the 600 years anniversary of the university. Siegfried is the recipient of five DOE excellence awards and in 2022 he was awarded the second APS Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics research for the first laboratory demonstration of a burning plasma. Since then, he received the 2023 senior scientist award of the Fulbright Foundation and the 2025 Edward Teller Medal of the American Nuclear Society.