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Professor Ian Shipsey FRS Hon.FInstP (1953-2024)

Ian was revered as one of the leading experimental particle physicists of his generation.


Professor Ian Shipsey, 2019 James Chadwick Medal prize winner

Professor Ian Shipsey was an experimental particle physicist who worked on large international science collaborations seeking to understand how the universe was born, will evolve and will end, by using particle accelerators and telescopes.

Ian was born in London, and after taking his first degree at Queen Mary University in 1982 and his PhD at Edinburgh in 1986, mostly working on the CERN NA31 experiment, moved to the US.

He spent time there working at Syracuse and then Purdue before returning to the UK in 2013. He was elected Head of Physics at the University of Oxford in 2018 and re-elected in 2023. He was the Henry Moseley Centenary Professor of Experimental Physics and a Professorial Fellow at St Catherine’s College.

His work dealt with the study of subatomic particles to probe the Standard Model of the building blocks of matter and the forces through which they interact.

One major focus was on experimentally tackling the flavour problem. He made incisive measurements of the rare decays of particles containing bottom (beauty) and charm quarks with the CLEO and CLEO-c experiments, in which he played leading and crucial roles. These showed consistency with the Standard Model predictions and excluded various alternatives.

His study of the suppression of the beauty quark-antiquark state (the upsilon) in heavy-ion collisions, provided compelling experimental evidence for the Quark-gluon plasma (long suspected but whose observation was a major challenge for the field).

More recently, Ian’s research group characterised in new detail the decay of the Higgs boson, discovered at CERN in 2012. And, since 2008, he had been leading on critical components of the Vera C Rubin Observatory, formerly the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), that could make transformative advances in understanding dark energy.

Ian was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2022 and received other accolades. His contributions to the elucidation of the physics of heavy quarks were recognised by Fellowship of the American Physical Society in 2002 and his contributions to particle physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012.

He was elected Chairperson of the Collaboration Board of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC at CERN, Switzerland (2013), elected a member of the Board of Directors of the LSST Corporation (2009-12 and 2017-2021), the Co-Coordinator of the LHC Physics Center at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) (2009-2012), and three times elected Co-Spokesperson of the CLEO experiment at Cornell University (2001-2004). Ian was also elected Chairperson of the APS Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) (2011-2014).

As a powerful supporter of improving provision for disabled students and colleagues, Ian, who had been profoundly deaf since 1989, spoke at conferences and gave talks to the public on hearing. He made a selection of YouTube videos on the physics of his cochlear implant and these have received thousands of views.

Ian died on 7 October 2024. He is survived by his wife Professor Daniela Bortoletto and their daughter Francesca.

Thanks to the University of Oxford for the biographical information.

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