Dr Lyn Evans CBE FRS, born Lyndon Rees Evans in 1945 in Aberdare, South Wales, is one of the most influential physicists of his generation, best known as the Project Leader of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
Evans was educated at Aberdare Boys' Grammar School before studying physics at University College Swansea, where he gained his PhD in 1970. He joined CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, the same year and spent the rest of his career there, working on successive generations of particle accelerators.
From 1994 he led the planning, design and construction of the LHC, a 27-kilometre ring built beneath the French-Swiss border designed to recreate conditions similar to those a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. He oversaw the accelerator's first successful beam circulation in 2008 and its role in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. He later directed the Linear Collider Collaboration, working on the next generation of particle colliders.
Evans has been honoured with a CBE and Fellowship of the Royal Society, and shared the 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize and the 2013 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with the CERN team.