Tribute to Professor Ian Shipsey

Colleagues are saddened by the loss of physicist Professor Ian Shipsey, who passed away on Monday 7 October.
Members of the School of Physics & Astronomy in Edinburgh are deeply shocked and saddened by the sudden death of our colleague and friend, Professor Ian Shipsey FRS, Head of the Physics department at the University of Oxford.
Professor Shipsey had many connections with the University of Edinburgh.
After studying physics at Queen Mary in his native London, he studied for his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. His thesis title was Measurement of the two gamma decays of neutral K-mesons, using data from the NA31 experiment at CERN.
He then moved to the USA, working at Syracuse and then Purdue before returning to the UK to take up a professorship at Oxford in 2013.
Ian was a valued colleague and collaborator to many of us in Edinburgh. He had remarkable energy and a great love for physics, bringing new ideas, strong leadership and valuable advice to every situation. He understood the importance of collegiality in science, always making time for a friendly and personal conversation when we were attending the same meetings.
Ian was a member of the International Advisory Panel for the Higgs Centre in Theoretical Physics. He was an active collaborator with Edinburgh physicists and astronomers, as was a member of research collaborations including the ATLAS experiment at the LHC at CERN and the Rubin LSST project, working with the particle physics groups and Wide-Field Astronomy Unit.
Ian visited Edinburgh on several occasions over the last decade.
Ian became profoundly deaf in his late-20s as a side effect of medical treatment and later became an early adopter of cochlear ear implants. In 2014, he presented a general interest seminar to the School on the physics and his experience with the implant, a recording of which can be found below.
Our thoughts are especially with his wife, Professor Daniela Bortoletto, also professor in physics at the University of Oxford and a collaborator with Edinburgh physicists, their daughter and family.