Gavin Salam is one of the most cited particle physicists in the world and his work has had a major impact on the physics program of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. His field of research is quantum chromodynamics. It describes the strong interaction between quarks and gluons. Gavin Salam also investigates two other fundamental forces of nature that are measured using accelerator experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider: the electroweak interaction and interactions between the Higgs boson and other particles of the Standard Model.
In 2018, Gavin Salam was appointed as a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. From 2010 to 2018, Gavin Salam worked as a staff scientist at CERN, from 2010-2012 as a Senior Research Physicist at Princeton, and from 2000 to 2010 as an Associate Scientist at the CNRS, the French national research center. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Cambridge.
In the course of his research career, Salam was awarded several high honors: In 2010 he received the CNRS Silver Medal, in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 2023 he obtained the Paul Dirac Gold Medal and Prize from the UK Institute of Physics.
“We are delighted to have gained a leading scientist in the field of theoretical particle physics in Gavin Salam,” says Giulia Zanderighi, Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. “With his academic profile and his many years of international expertise, he will enrich research at the Institute and provide interesting new impetus.”