Travel: Professor Tejinder Virdee

Born in Kenya, now commuting between the Alps and London, Professor Tejinder Virdee is a particle physicist working at the CMS experiment at CERN. Born in the foothills of Mount Kenya, now commuting between the foothills of the Alps and London, Imperial's Professor Tejinder Virdee is a well-heeled citizen of the world. Over the last 30 years his work as a particle physicist has taken him around the globe while championing a border-crossing experiment that has changed the face of physics and our understanding of the Universe. Tejinder's globetrotting began when he was a postgraduate at Imperial, with trips to America's national accelerator laboratory in Stanford to collect data for his PhD (Physics 1979). "At the time, few universities offered this kind of opportunity for a young student to travel on the job, but there were only a few places where you could do large scale particle physics experiments," he explains. These early experiences inspired Tejinder to move from London to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, where he pioneered new approaches to high energy physics. By 1989 CERN's Large Hadron Collider project was beginning to get going.