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Tejinder (Jim) Virdee, FRS, is Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. In 2012 he celebrated 30 years at Imperial College. Virdee is best known for originating the concept and overseeing the construction of Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) [1], experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, with four other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' [2] of the project. In July 2012 CMS, along with the ATLAS experiment, announced the discovery of a Higgs boson [3] that merited the 2013 Physics Nobel Prize to the theorists [4] who discovered the mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of fundamental particles. CMS is now a world-wide collaboration which started in 1990 and has over 3000 participants from 38 countries. Virdee was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012 and was knighted in the the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2014. |
At an awards ceremony here, organised by the Asian Achievers Awards 2014, Virdee received the award for his outstanding achievements in the field of physics.
In recognition of his work on CMS, he has been awarded the Institute of Physics 2007 High Energy Physics Prize and the IOP 2009 Chadwick Medal and Prize.
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Institute of Physics in 2012 and in 2014 he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to science.
The award recipients on Friday night also included Dr Richie Nanda, an international security magnate and the executive chairman of Topsgrup and The Shield Group (Entrepreneur of the Year).
Other award recipients were Mumbai-born Hanif Kureishi, an English playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker and novelist (achievement in media, arts and culture); Wasim Gulzar Khan, the first British-born Pakistani to play professional cricket in England (achievement in community service); and Dilawar Singh, director, Sports Council for Glasgow, the first Asian and Sikh police officer in Scotland, who spent over 30 years with Strathclyde Police (sports personality of the year).
Philip Hammond, Britain’s secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs, who was the chief guest, said a new generation of Asian entrepreneurs was encouraging the British Asian community to expand into new sectors.
“Today, 50,000 British Asian businesses in the UK together generate more than 60 billion pounds nationwide,” he said.
The High Commissioner of India to the UK, Ranjan Mathai, was among the prominent personalities present on the occasion.