19 Facts About Tejinder Virdee

Tejinder Virdee is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project.

In recognition of his work on CMS, Virdee has been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions.

In 2014, Tejinder Virdee was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours list for services to science.

Tejinder Virdee has served on Scientific Advisory Committees of numerous international physics institutes and on the Physical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020.

Tejinder Virdee was born in 1952 to Sikh parents Udham Kaur and Chain Singh Virdee in Nyeri, Kenya.

Tejinder Virdee went to school in Kisumu at the Kisumu Boys High School.

Tejinder Virdee remembers visiting Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry, where he stumbled across a cloud chamber sparking his interest in the study of the structure of matter.

Since 1991 Tejinder Virdee has played a crucial role in all phases of CMS.

Tejinder Virdee has been the driving force behind many of the major technology decisions made in CMS, especially the selection of the calorimeter technologies.

In 1992, at a meeting in Evian, entitled 'Towards the LHC Experimental Programme' meeting, Tejinder Virdee championed the case for the selection of CMS amongst four competing experiment conceptual designs.

Tejinder Virdee made the case within the CMS experiment, to CERN's Management and to the LHCC.

Tejinder Virdee led the team that proved the viability of this technique, a technique that has played a crucial role in the discovery of the new heavy boson, in July 2012.

Tejinder Virdee was deeply involved in the data analysis for the search for the Higgs boson, especially via its two-photon decay mode whose analysis was very much along the lines described in the study above.

Tejinder Virdee was the deputy project leader of CMS between 1993 and 2006 and was then elected project leader in January 2007 for a period of three years.

Tejinder Virdee oversaw the final stages of construction, installation and data taking with the first collisions at the LHC.

Tejinder Virdee is a major voice in arguing for the long-term future of the LHC accelerator and its experiments.

Tejinder Virdee is leading efforts to replace the detector's endcaps with a novel silicon-based technology that measures the energy and momentum of particles to unprecedented levels of precision.

Tejinder Virdee funds science-related education activities in schools and universities in Africa, India and the United Kingdom.

Tejinder Virdee has given several keynote speeches at international conferences, opening or closing addresses at particle physics conferences and public lectures on the LHC Project.