Tejinder Virdee is a physicist who has led on the design, construction and operation of experiments to improve our understanding of particle physics. In 1990, he was one of the founding fathers of the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in 2012 shared the credit for discovering the elusive Higgs boson.

Tejinder’s role at CMS was key to developing new technologies within the detector to increase its reliability and accuracy, and he has in recent years acted as leader of the international collaboration, which includes nearly 4,000 researchers from 42 countries. He remains a strong advocate for the LHC and is recognised as a leader in the particle physics community.

Tejinder has won numerous awards for his contributions to particle physics, including the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society. In June 2014, he was made a Knight Bachelor for services to science.