Richard Keith Ellis, (born 17 November 1949) is a British

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experime ...

, working at the

University of Durham Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by royal charte ...

, and a leading authority on perturbative quantum chromodynamics and collider phenomenology.

Education

Ellis graduated from the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

(MA 1971, D.Phil. 1974). He has held positions at Imperial College,

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

, CERN and the University of Rome.

Career and research

Ellis went to

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been opera ...

in 1984 and was Head of the Theoretical Physics Department there from 1993 to 2004. In 2015 he moved to the

in the UK, where he was a professor of Physics and Director of the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology until the end of 2019. Ellis' work is of importance to the study of elementary particles at colliders, such as the Fermilab Tevatron, and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Ellis has contributed in a substantial way to the interpretation of experiments performed at high energy. Together with Douglas Ross and Tony Terrano he performed the first calculation of jet structure in e+e- annihilation which allowed precise determination of the strong coupling. In addition, with Guido Altarelli and Guido Martinelli he performed a calculation of lepton pair production which allow reconciliation of observed rates with theoretical calculations. He has also co-authored a number of widely read papers on the theory of heavy quark production. He is also co-author for the parton-level Monte Carlo program MCFM. Ellis is the coauthor with W. J. Stirling and B. R. Webber of a book on QCD and collider physics published by Cambridge University Press in 1996.

Honours and awards

Ellis was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1988 and a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathemat ...

of London in 2009. Also in 2009, Ellis together with John Collins and Davison Soper won the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, ''For work in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics, including applications to problems pivotal to the interpretation of high energy particle collisions.'' In 2019 he was awarded the Paul Dirac medal of the Institute of Physics,Paul Dirac Medal and Prize recipients
/ref> ''For his seminal work in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) where he performed many of the key calculations that led to the acceptance of QCD as the correct theory of the strong interaction.''

References

1949 births Living people British theoretical physicists People associated with CERN Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the American Physical Society J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics recipients People associated with Fermilab Academics of Durham University {{physicist-stub