Elected: 2021
Country (Nationality)
South Africa
Discipline
Physical Sciences
Bio
A PhD from Columbia University, Bruce Mellado, is a Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, a Senior Researcher of iThemba LABS and serves as the Director of the Institute for Collider Particle Physics. Currently, he is the Chairperson of the Institutional Board of the Tile Calorimeter at the ATLAS experiment at the European laboratory CERN. He was the National Contact Physicist of South Africa at the ATLAS experiment and the co-Chair of the Nuclear Particle and Radiation Division of South African Institute of Physics. He is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the TW Kambule-NSTF Award for Research in 2021 and the Vice-Chancellor Award for Research in 2022. Prof. Mellado is an Internationally acclaimed, B1 rated researcher of the National Research Foundation.
Prof. Mellado is an expert on the Higgs boson – a sub-atomic particle that is thought to give matter its mass – and was a leading participant in its discovery that was announced in 2012 and led to the Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded in 2013 to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs. Among his contributions here is the proposal and demonstration that Higgs boson candidates can be classified according to the presence of hadronic jets. Prof. Mellado is also known for his seminal contributions to the proposal of the Large Hadron Electron Collider as a Higgs boson facility.
Prof. Mellado is also the Co-President of the Africa-Canada Artificial Intelligence Data Modelling Consortium.