Ian P. J. Shipsey FRS (23 July 1959 – 7 October 2024) was a British experimental particle physicist who led many significant scientific collaborations associated with the CLEO, ATLAS, and CMS experiments, as well as being the head of the physics department at the University of Oxford between 2018 and 2024.
His thesis focused on measuring the decay width of neutral K-mesons into two photons using data from the NA31 experiment carried out at the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN.
Shipsey was one of the key proponents for and CLEO-c experiment, results from which were used to make the most precise tests for lattice QCD heavy quark calculations.
With his students he also measured Upsilon meson suppression in Large Hadron Collider heavy-ion collisions provided experimental evidence for quark-gluon plasma.
[1] Twelve years later he acquired a cochlear ear implant that reinstated some of his hearing, following which he became a major advocate of the technology, giving over 100 public talks on it.