Eight UCI faculty members, dozens of postdoctoral researchers and staff members were involved in the 2008 launch of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. UCI affiliates developed electronics, computer systems and software integral to collecting and recording data. Andrew Lankford, professor of physics & astronomy, served as deputy director of the LHC’s ATLAS experiment. In 2013, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for their elementary particle mass theory, confirmed via the LHC discovery of the Higgs boson. Read more here.