Honorary Fellows: Professor Valerie Gibson

Professor Valerie Gibson is renowned worldwide for cutting-edge research and key discoveries in particle physics, championing women in science, and contributions to public engagement.

She has played pivotal roles in key experiments designed to understand why our universe is made of matter (and no antimatter) through a phenomenon called “CP violation” and to search for new physics that could explain this immense effect. Major achievements include the first observation of direct CP violation and confirmation of CPT invariance in the K meson system; the design and development of silicon microvertex detectors and measurements of B meson mixing and decays; and measurements of CP violation in B meson decays and the discovery of ultra-rare B meson decays.

She is a driving force behind the University of Cambridge’s national and international equality, diversity and inclusion activities. As Chair of the IOP Juno Panel, she advised and nurtured many physics departments and institutes both nationally and internationally. Her hard work, passion and commitment culminated in an Athena SWAN Gold award for Cambridge physics; the first UK physics department to achieve such an accolade. She became the university’s Gender Equality Champion, working with the Vice-Chancellor to address recruitment and promotion biases, culture in the workplace and the gender pay gap.

She is founder and Patron of the biennial Gravity Fields Festival, Grantham, which celebrates Sir Isaac Newton through science and art. She dedicated much of her own time to the festival, engaging with the local community and schools, and developing inspiring science programmes. She championed the first Fellow of Modern Science at the Science Museum, Harry Cliff, and was scientific advisor for the Collider exhibition, reaching more than 600,000 people during its world tour. She has given many lectures at schools and public events and has appeared four times on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time.

She was appointed Head of High Energy Physics at Cambridge (2013-2023). She is a founder member of the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN and was elected UK Spokesperson (2004-2008) with overall responsibility for all aspects of the project and to ensure that the UK was poised to fully exploit the scientific opportunities arising from it. She was elected Chair of the LHCb Collaboration Board (2016-2020).

Her personal contributions to women in science were recognised with the 2013 WISE Campaign Leader Award and she was among the winners of the 2016 Royal Society Athena Prize. She received an OBE in the 2021 new year honours for “services to science, women in science and public engagement”.