Professor François Englert

Nobel Prize Laureate Prof. François Englert, Sackler Professor by Special Appointment for the academic year 2022/2023, is Professor Emeritus at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium. Prof. Englert is also a distinguished visiting professor and founding member of the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California, USA.

Prof. Englert graduated in Electromechanical Engineering (1955) and Physics (1958) from the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Brussels, Belgium, where he also later received a Ph.D. in Physics (1959). He then joined the Physics Department at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, as a research associate (1959–1960) and an assistant professor (1960–1961). In 1961, Prof. Englert returned to ULB, where he was appointed professor (1961-1998). At ULB, he was joined by Belgian Physicist Robert Brout, who co-headed together with him the theoretical physics group since 1980. In 1984, Prof. Englert was first appointed as a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1998, Prof. Englert became professor emeritus. In 2011, Prof. Englert joined the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California, USA, where he serves as a distinguished visiting professor and a founding member of the Institute for Quantum Studies. Prof. Englert was a Sackler Lecturer at The Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), Tel Aviv University, Israel (2016-2017).

Prof. Englert has made contributions in statistical physics, quantum field theory, cosmology, string theory and supergravity, and received many honors for his work: he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Higgs, for the discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism (2013); the Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research, together with Peter Higgs and the CERN (2013); the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics together with Gerry Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, Tom Kibble, Peter Higgs, and Robert Brout (2010); the Wolf Prize in Physics together with R. Brout and P. Higgs (2004) and the High Energy and Particle Prize of the European Physical Society together with R. Brout and P. Higgs for the mechanism which unifies short and long-range interactions by generating massive gauge vector bosons (1997).