Prof. Tejinder Singh Virdee

Prof. Tejinder Singh Virdee is distinguished for his crucial role, over the last 30 years, in the design, construction, and physics exploitation of the Compact Muon Solenoid at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, one of two experiments that made the ground-breaking discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. Prof. Virdee carried out his graduate studies at Imperial College London on an experiment conducted at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre, Stanford. Since 1979 he has worked on experiments at CERN including on the UA1 proton-antiproton collider experiment that discovered the mediators of the weak interaction, the W and Z bosons. He is one of the conceivers and founders of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC. Prof. Virdee pioneered some of the techniques used in the CMS experiment that were crucial for the discovery of the Higgs boson. He was the leader of the CMS Collaboration for three years, from 2007, that included the start of collision data taking, and was its deputy leader from 1993 to 2006. Beyond his innovative work in particle physics, he is also a campaigner for science, and education in Africa and India. His work has been recognized by numerous awards – including Fellowship of the Royal Society, the Fundamental Physics Prize, the UK Institute of Physics Chadwick and Glazebrook Medals & Prizes, the European Physical Society HEPP Prize, the American Physical Society Panofsky Prize and the Blaise Pascal Medal in Physics from the European Academy of Sciences. In 2014, Prof. Virdee was knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II for his achievements in science.