Tom Ypsilantis was born in Salt Lake City in 1928. His father was killed by lightning in 1931. He graduated from
South High School in 1945, and attended the
University of Utah graduating with a degree in chemistry in 1949. He then attended the
University of California, Berkeley where he joined the four person team at the Berkeley
Bevatron that observed the first
antiproton; this became the subject of his PhD thesis and the two senior members of this team won the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. Ypsilantis was associate professor of physics at the
University of California, Berkeley, and was instrumental in the founding of the
Demokritos Research Center in Athens, Greece. In 1969, he went to Geneva to work at
CERN (Centre European Research Nucleaire), where he met Jacques Séguinot. In 1977, Ypsilantis and Séguinot proposed the technique later called the
Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) counter. Together with
Tord Ekelöf, they introduced this technique for high-energy physics: the first large-scale application was for the
DELPHI experiment at
LEP. They later worked in the framework of the
LAAS Project on noble-liquid
calorimetry and on a very large water
neutrino detector based on the fast-RICH technique. Ypsilantis also made major contributions to the
LHCb experiment at CERN. He served as the Senior Research Director in Geneva, Project Director in
Bologna, Italy, and Consultant to the French Nuclear Agency in Saclay, France. ==References==