"Physics at CERN brings Nations together"

Jonathan Richard Ellis is a British theoretical physicist. He attended Cambridge University, earning his Ph.D. in 1971. His research interests focus on particle physics, though he has also made important contributions to astrophysics, cosmology and quantum gravity. After brief post-doc positions at SLAC and Caltech, he went to CERN and has held a permanent contract there since 1978. He was awarded the Maxwell Medal and the Paul Dirac Prize by the Institute of Physics in 1982 and 2005 respectively, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1985 and of the Institute of Physics in 1991. He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Southampton and Uppsala University.

Ellis is well known for his efforts to involve non-European nations in CERN scientific activities, and interacts frequently with physicists, administrators at universities and institutes and ministers of funding agencies and diplomatic corps from a wide variety of countries. These range from major CERN partners like the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, India, Israel and China, to states with nascent physics programs such as Azerbaijan, the Baltic republics, Bolivia, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Iran, Madagascar, New Zealand, Pakistan, Romania, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and lately in Palestine, where the picture was taken. These interactions have fostered the international character of CERN and opened the pathways of scientific discourse all around the world.