Professor Tejinder Singh Virdee FRS ~ elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society

	On 19 April 2012 the following (amongst others) were elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society.
Professor Tejinder Singh Virdee FRS Professor of Physics, Department of Physics, Imperial College London Tejinder Virdee is primarily distinguished for the design, construction and exploitation of the huge CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. He originated the concept of CMS with four colleagues around 1990 and there are now over 3000 participants from 38 countries. The motivation is the discovery of the mass generating mechanism for matter, currently considered to be the Higgs mechanism, and the nature of what lies beyond the Standard Model. Virdee devised a new technology for the large CMS electromagnetic calorimeter and one of his earlier innovations was employed for the hadron calorimeter. He was leader of the collaboration during final commissioning and first data taking between 2006 and 2010 and now concentrates on the search for the Higgs boson. The superb performance of CMS since high energy collisions began at the LHC is testimony to his foresight, expertise and appreciation of the complex interplay of techniques which are needed for such success. http://royalsociety.org/people/tejinder-virdee/
In October 2010 he was awarded “Sikhs in Education” in the world’s first awards to recognize Sikh contributions across society. The event was held in London.

About The Royal Society

An engineering model of Ariel 1 hangs in the Society's atrium. This was the first satellite launched as a result of international collaboration (© PSP Rare)

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose, as it has been since its foundation in 1660, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

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