©
CERN
Dear Colleagues,
I am very sorry to share that Ian Shipsey collapsed and died yesterday morning. Our first thoughts are with his wife of over thirty years, our colleague, Professor Daniela Bortoletto, their daughter Francesca Shipsey, and family members on their devastating personal loss.
Ian was one of the leading experimental particle physicists of his generation. He was born in London, taking his first degree at Queen Mary in 1982 and his PhD at Edinburgh University in 1986, mostly working on the CERN NA31 experiment. He moved to the USA, working at Syracuse and then Purdue before coming to Oxford in 2013. He was elected Head of Physics in 2018 and re-elected in 2023.
Ian’s 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 tackling experimentally 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 group has characterised with important new detail the decay of the Higgs boson, discovered at CERN in 2012. Since 2008, Ian has also been leading efforts on critical components of the Vera Rubin/LSST Observatory that will allow us to make transformative advances in understanding dark energy. Ian’s election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2022 was perhaps the most visible but, in truth, just one of the very many accolades he received. Ian was a powerful supporter of improving our provision for disabled students and colleagues, having himself been profoundly deaf since 1989. His YouTube videos on the physics of his cochlear implant have had thousands of views.
While his research group and colleagues in Physics will feel his loss most acutely, Ian was well-known and admired across the Division and the University. Many of us have seen his backpacked figure, no doubt late for a meeting, running around the streets of Oxford. His loss will impact the physics community here in the UK and the world.
My personal experience of Ian began during the process of my application for the job I now hold. Ian was tasked to talk to candidates about what the departments wanted from the next Head of Division. Those first impressions of him have remained unchanged during the time we have worked together and gotten to know one another. Ian was friendly, charming, warm, energetic, funny, deeply intelligent, absolutely committed to excellence, and inspiring in his relentless advocacy of Physics, both as a subject and Department. I greatly admired him as a scientist, valued him as a colleague, and we shared more than a few chuckles as he would try to charm me to get something through (always to the advantage of the Physics Department, never once for his own benefit). I am so very sad at his loss, and I will miss him greatly.
On behalf of the entire Division, I express my deepest condolences to all those who knew and worked with Ian.
Jim Naismith, Head of MPLS Division