Honorary Fellows: Professor Ian Shipsey

Professor Ian Shipsey has made major contributions to key physics questions, including the flavour problem, understanding dark energy and the development of novel applications of quantum instrumentation to fundamental physics.

The flavour problem is the Standard Model‘s inability to explain the three generations of fermions. Shipsey’s crucial measurements include: the most precise determination of four elements of the quark-mixing matrix; rare processes including Bs → muon muon; evidence for Higgs-field generation of the muon mass; first measurement of b-quark production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); and Upsilon suppression in heavy-ion collisions, providing evidence for the quark-gluon plasma.

To enable these measurements, Shipsey constructed outstanding silicon detectors for the CLEOdetector at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) , CMS at LHC, and currently ATLAS at LHC and Mu3e at the Paul Scherrer Institute, as well as muon detectors for CLEO and NA31 at CERN, designing the construction facilities. In 2000, Shipsey was crucial to the approval and success of CLEO-c/CESR-c. He was thrice elected CLEO/CLEO-c co-spokesperson.

Leveraging his expertise in silicon, in 2008, Shipsey pioneered US Department of Energy (DOE) particle-physics involvement in the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera, a ground-based 8.4-meter wide-field telescope and 3-gigapixel CCD camera. LSST is the largest camera ever constructed for astronomy, designed in part to make definitive dark-energy measurements. His work with Teledyne-e2v facilitated their selection as an LSST camera vendor. Shipsey chaired the Rubin Dark- Energy Science Collaboration Advisory Board (2016–2017). He is the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) LSST:UK sensors work package principal investigator (2016–2023). As an elected director of the LSST Discovery Alliance (LDA), in 2011 Shipsey initiated a key review for the US National Science Foundation Final Design Review. He presented Rubin frequently, including on Capitol Hill. He chaired the LDA Admissions Committee (2017–2022).

On CMS (2002–2015), Shipsey was the first Quarkonia co-convener. He reorganized the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab, invented the CMS Data Analysis School and created the CMS-LPC Fellows programme. He was elected CMS Collaboration-Board chair (2013–2014). Elected American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) chair (2012- 2015), Shipsey co-coordinated the strategic-planning exercise Snowmass-2013, and developed the DPF Instrumentation Prizes.

At the University of Oxford, he created the Kavli-IPMU-Oxford Physics-Graduate-Scholarship programme. After a very successful period as the head of the particle-physics subdepartment, he was elected Head of Physics in 2018 and re-elected in 2023.

Shipsey was instrumental in developing UK Research and Innovation’s Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics Programme (2018–2020) and is playing a leading role in establishing the future programme in the UK. He is developing cameras for the MAGIS (US) and AION (UK) networked pathfinder atom interferometers searching for ultralight dark matter and mid-band gravitational waves.

Shipsey leads International Committee for Future Accelerators’s Instrumentation Innovation and Development Panel, and co-led the USA-DOE Instrumentation Roadmap Panel (2019–2020). He is co-coordinator of the European Committee on Future Accelerators Instrumentation Roadmap Panel.