Nikolitsa (Lia) Merminga is a Greek-born accelerator physicist. In 2022, she was appointed director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the first woman to hold the position.^[1] She has worked at other national laboratories in Canada and the United States.

Merminga grew up in Greece, where she attended all-girl middle and high schools. By the time she was sixteen years old, she knew she wanted to be a physicist, having been inspired by her family members, a high school physics teacher, and a biography of Marie Curie.^[2][3][4] She received her undergraduate degree from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1983, where she studied physics. She then moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in physics at the University of Michigan. There, she completed a Master’s of Science in Physics and a Master’s of Science in Mathematics and worked with doctoral advisors Lawrence W. Jones and Donald A. Edwards.^[5][3][4] She completed her thesis, A Study of Nonlinear Dynamics in the Fermilab Tevatron,^[6] using data from Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator^[2] and completed her PhD in 1989.^[5]

After completing her PhD, Merminga held a postdoctoral position at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the accelerator theory group.^[5][3] In 1992, she joined Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility as a member of the Center for Advanced Studies of Accelerators (CASA). In 2002, she became director of CASA's beam physics group, her first managerial position.^[5][3] In 2008, she joined Canada's TRIUMF laboratory as head of their accelerator program,^[5][3] one of the most senior scientific positions in Canada.^[7] There, she oversaw the design and construction of an accelerator that produced rare isotopes for use in medicine and nuclear physics.^[3] She returned to SLAC in 2015, when she became that lab's Associate Director for Accelerators and a professor at Stanford University.^[4] Around the same time, she took on another leadership role as a member of the U.S. Department of Energy's inaugural Energy Sciences Leadership Group from 2016 to 2017.^[8] Merminga returned to Fermilab in 2018 as director of the lab's Proton Improvement Plan II (PIP-II) project,^[2] the first particle accelerator project with major contributions by other countries to be hosted in the United States.^[9]

On 5 April 2022, it was announced that Merminga had been appointed as the next director of Fermilab.^[10] In addition to her role at Fermilab, as of February 10, 2023, Merminga serves as a member of the Board of Trustees at Illinois State University.^[11]

• Elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), in 2006, after a nomination from the APS Division of Physics of Beams, "for leadership in designing and developing energy recovery linacs, and applications to light sources and electron-ion colliders"^[12]
• Minerva BC Women In™ Science Community Leadership and Excellence Award, 2013^[13]
• Member of the U.S. Department of Energy's inaugural Energy Sciences Leadership Group, 2016-2017^[8]

• Author page at INSPIRE-HEP