Francis Halzen

Francis Louis Halzen (born 23 March 1944) is a Belgian-American physicist who has worked in both theoretical and experimental particle physics, including high-energy astrophysics. Born in Belgium, he was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven and worked as a scientific associate at CERN before moving to the United States, where he has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 1972. Since 2001 he has been the principal investigator and co-spokesperson of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world's largest neutrino detector, based at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. He received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin."