The Institute of Physics (IOP) has awarded Birmingham Professor David Charlton the Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize for his leadership in particle physics. Professor Charlton received the medal at the prestigious IOP Award Winners 2017 ceremony, which was held in London on Tuesday 7 November.

Professor Charlton received the award for his leadership in experimental work on the electroweak standard model, beginning with the study of Z-boson decays at LEP and culminating in the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC.

The Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize is one of the Institute of Physics’ most prestigious awards. Every year since 1983 the Institute has issued the award for outstanding and sustained contributions to leadership in a physics context.

Professor Charlton is a leading contemporary experimental particle physicist both in the UK and internationally.

From early searches for the top quark, through wide-ranging measurements of weak gauge boson properties and most recently in the discovery and characterisation of the Higgs boson, Professor Charlton has been a central figure in the building, data collection, analysis and leadership of energy frontier particle physics experiments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research.

As Deputy Spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN, Professor Charlton played a significant role in the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle in 2012. The discovery confirmed the last unverified part of the Standard Model of particle physics, which scientists have worked on for decades.

For four years from 2013, Profressor Charlton served as head of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. ATLAS is a global collaboration of 3,000 scientists. The Large Hadron Collider has undergone a significant upgrade since the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, allowing it to continue to make further advances in the field of particle physics.

You can read more about the awards, including IOP President Professor Dame Julia Higgins' speech, on the IOP website.

Photo: edit 047 flickr photo by The Institute of Physics shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license