Dr. Manjit Kaur is one of India’s most distinguished experimental high energy physicists, with over four decades of dedicated research at the forefront of particle physics. A retired Professor of Physics at Panjab University, Chandigarh, she continues to be an active contributor to global research efforts and a mentor to emerging physicists across institutions such as IIT Kanpur, IISER Pune, and CERN.

Her career is marked by pioneering involvement in some of the world’s most advanced high-energy physics experiments. She is a long-standing member of the CMS Collaboration at CERN, where she contributed to the historic discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and continues to play an integral role in the Standard Model Physics (SMP-Had) group, focusing on non-perturbative QCD, jet substructure, and Drell-Yan processes. She was also a Scientific Associate in the L3 experiment at LEP (CERN) and made critical contributions to ZEUS at DESY (Germany) as part of the Max Planck Institute’s research team. Earlier in her career, she was part of the EMU01 Collaboration, studying pion and heavy-ion interactions at ultrarelativistic energies.

In 2023, Dr. Kaur was conferred the prestigious Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) degree by Panjab University (Notification No. PU-DOC/2023/1) for her seminal thesis titled:

“Contributions to the Understanding of Strong and Electroweak Interactions in Collisions of Leptons and Hadrons at High Energy Colliders.”

This body of work encapsulates her lifetime contributions to understanding the fabric of matter through proton-proton, lepton-hadron, and heavy-ion collisions.

Her publication record is prolific—with over 1400 research publications, an h-index of 136, and more than 83,000 citations, placing her among the top 2% of scientists worldwide. She is a co-author of CMS’s most cited paper, “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC,” and a 2025 Laureate of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for Run-2 publications of the LHC.

Dr. Kaur has served in numerous leadership roles including:

• Team Leader, PU-CMS at CERN (2017–2019)

• Deputy Spokesperson, India-CMS Collaboration (2012–2016)

• Member, CMS Collaboration Board

• President and Vice President, Indian Association of Physics Teachers (IAPT)

In addition to her research, she is passionately committed to mentoring the next generation of physicists and science outreach, having organized seven editions of the National Student Symposium of Physics and delivered several public lectures. She is also Chief Editor of the monthly Physics Bulletin published by IAPT.

Her current research interests include:

• Jet topology and QCD event shapes

• Non-extensive statistical mechanics in particle interactions

• Multiplicity distributions in pp and ep collisions

• Strong coupling constant extractions at future colliders (FCC-ee and EIC)

Dr. Kaur holds multiple degrees including:

• D.Sc. (Physics), Panjab University (2024)

• Ph.D. (Physics), Panjab University (1981)

• M.C.A. (Computer Applications), IGNOU (2005)

She continues her research as Professor Emeritus at Amity University, Punjab, and as a mentor and contributor in international high energy physics collaborations.