Francis Halzen

Francis Louis Halzen is a Belgian-American physicist, born in Tienen, Belgium, in 1944, who has worked in both theoretical and experimental particle physics, including high-energy astrophysics. He was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven, worked as a scientific associate at CERN and moved to the United States, where he has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1972. Since 2001 he has been principal investigator and co-spokesperson of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the largest neutrino detector, at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. He received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for decisive contributions to IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.