At the VUB graduation ceremony held on October 6 at the beautiful Brussels town hall, Stef Duponcheel received the Robert Brout prize, a prestigious prize the Solvay Institutes award to honour a VUB and ULB master student in physics with an excellent academic record and an inspiring dissertation.
Stef graduated as a Master in physics and astronomy in July 2025 with greatest distinction from VUB.
His master thesis entitled "Background estimations in the measurement of the charm-Higgs Yukawa coupling at the CMS experiment" was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Michael Tytgat and Dr. Gerrit Van Onsem.
Since September 2025, he continues his academic aspirations at the IIHE, with a PhD project in the realm of searches for yet unobserved phenomena with the CMS experiment, under supervision of Prof. Steven Lowette.
While Robert Brout was an all-round physicist, he is most renowned for his contribution to theoretical particle physics.
Together with his companion in science, François Englert, Brout introduced a consistent mechanism to explain why bosonic particles have mass. In 2013, François Englert and Peter Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics after he discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.