Ian Shipsey, a physicist passed away at the age of 65, was known for developing silicon devices of precision to study subatomic particle collisions and light from the edge of the universe.
Shipsey played a significant role in unlocking the secrets of the earliest fractions of a second of the universe using these silicon devices.
Ever since going profoundly deaf after leukaemia treatment in 1989, Shipsey wore a cochlear implant from 2001 that helped him develop strategies to better interact with people and bridge disabilities.
Shipsey was not only known for posing the right scientific questions, but also for developing the necessary detectors that could yield answers to them.
He was one of the leaders of LHC experimentation, and developed novel silicon detectors to isolate rare decay instances of muon.
He led the application of silicon detectors to track the light from extremely remote objects in the universe and was a pioneer of the Vera C Rubin Observatory LSST Camera in both the US and the UK.
Towards the end of his career, in his pursuit to address fundamental questions in science, he steered several major initiatives to success, generally revolving around devices based on quantum entanglement.
Born in London, Shipsey was the son of Mary and Edward Shipsey. He graduated in physics from what is now Queen Mary University, London.
Ian hallucinated asymmetries in particle physics laws to determine the differences between matter and antimatter and constructed his first silicon detector for the project, leading to his pioneering work in developing silicon devices.
Despite his enormous load of research, he inspired over 100 faculty members as a dynamic head of the physics department at Oxford as Henry Moseley Centenary professor of experimental physics.