Christophe Royon

Dr. Royon joined KU's Physics Department in 2016 after serving as Director of Research at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). He is a specialist of nuclear and high energy physics and worked on the proton and heavy ion structure, as well as potential signal of beyond standard model physics at the HERA, DESY, Hamburg, Germany, the Tevatron, Fermilab, and the LHC, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, colliders.

In 2021, Dr. Royon and his KU team found experimental evidence for the existence of the odderon quasiparticle as a result of analyzing proton collisions at high speeds. Dr. Royon was awarded the Humboldt Research Award in Germany in 2018 and the High Energy Physics Prize by the European Physics Society in 2013 and 2019 for the Higgs boson discovery and the discovery and analysis of the top quark, respectively. He received the gold medal of the Mexican Physical Society, Division of Particle and Fields, in 2022.

Dr. Royon and his team were awarded a three-year, $1.4 million grant from NASA in 2019 to help design and build a particle telescope to launch into orbit aboard a satellite. Also in 2019 his team was awarded a two-year, $400,000 Department of Energy (DoE) grant to investigate strong interactions between quarks and gluons — building materials for the protons and neutrons that make up an atomic nucleus.