FIND A BLOG ------------------------- Einstein: Big Idea Career Week Rosa Alba Stephon Alexander Ursula Bassler Nick Brook Karsten Buesser Alessandro Cardini Bryan Dahmes Frederic Deliot Tommaso Dorigo John Ellis Makoto Fujiwara Rob Gardner Claire Gray Debbie Harris Karsten Heeger Alex Koutsman Sandra Leone Maaike Limper Frank Linde Shohei Nishida Jose Ocariz Caolionn O'Connell Marcello Pavan Sarah Phillips Anuj Purwar Julio Rodriguez Martino Peter Steinberg Andrey Tamanov Sophie Trincaz-Duvoid David Waller Gordon Watts Jochen Weller Zhi-Zhong Xing John Ellis: BIO CERN Read John's blog Watch John's video Born in London on July 1st, 1946, I grew up in Potters Bar, a suburb that Londoners used to regard as the northern boundary of civilization. It was when I was around 12 years old that I decided I wanted to become a physicist: the fiction books for kids in the local public library were pretty boring, and I much preferred the non-fiction books, particularly those about space and science, and the physics books most of all. At Cambridge University I studied mathematics and theoretical physics, also auditing some courses in classical Greek history. I still like visiting archaeological sites whenever I can. The summer before I started research was spent at CERN: I fell in love with its international atmosphere, and also spent there the last year of my PhD. For a while I hesitated between theoretical research in cosmology and particle physics, before opting for the latter. Nowadays, I am lucky enough to work on both subjects, often in the same research paper, as the two subjects have really grown together. One of the most exciting aspects of our subject is how the physics of the very small can be used to describe the Universe on the largest possible scales. After my PhD, I spent a couple of years in California at SLAC and Caltech, visiting National Parks, hiking, trying rafting and (occasionally) doing postdoctoral research. In 1973 I came back to CERN, expecting to stay for just a couple of years before returning to England, but I have had the good fortune to work here ever since. It was great fun in the early days, before the Standard Model got established, working on gluons, the Higgs boson and CP violation. Subsequently, I have also worked on grand unification, supersymmetry, dark matter, neutrino physics, string theory and quantum gravity. I like trying to confront novel theoretical ideas with experiment. Over the years, I have participated in physics studies for LEP and the LHC, and most recently CLIC. After leading the CERN Theory Division for six years, more recently I have been advising on CERN’s relations with non-Member States. Particle physics is a great vehicle for bringing together people from different countries, even if their politicians are antagonistic. My wife is Colombian, one of our children was born in the US and the other in Switzerland, so our family is its own little United Nations.