Jean Cleymans

Not to be confused with Jean Clemens.

Jean Cleymans (5 August 1944—22 February 2021)^[1] was a Belgian physicist and a professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He made notable contributions to the area of quark-gluon plasma physics with  focus on statistical hadronization.^[2]

Jean Cleymans died in an accident in his hometown Turnhout on February 22, 2021.^[2][3]

Education

Cleymans obtained his doctorate in physics in 1970 at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve,^[4] Belgium and completed his post-doctoral training in 1977 with habilitation in theoretical and particle-manybody physics at the University of Bielefeld, Germany.^[5][6]

Work

Cleymans' research addressed topics pursued by the ALICE Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider of the CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Together with professor Zeblon Vilakazi,^[7] he was instrumental in establishing the South Africa-CERN programme,^[8] the successor to the UCT-CERN Research Centre.^[6] He also contributed to the SA-Joint Institute for Nuclear Research with Russia and was Leader of the UCT-ALICE Collaboration at CERN.^[6]

Cleymans, a theoretical physicists, has  co-authored 299 articles and conference papers with 8,639 citations (status March 3, 2021). In addition,  he is listed on 100 LHC-ALICE experimental works which have earned more than 6,000 citations. He also edited a number of books, reports and conference proceedings. His articles have been published in a variety of international journals, among others the European Physical Journal, Physical Review and Physics Letters.^[9] Over the years he supervised 24 MSc and 17 PhD students.^[1][6]

Cleymans acted as referee for several journals and was listed as a distinguished EPJ referee in 2017.^[10] He was member of the editorial board of the MDPI journal Physics^[11] and he served as chairman of the South Africa-CERN Programme.^[12]

Family

Cleymans was married to Ria (Maria) since 1968, they have two daughters Sylvie (1969-2021) and Silke (1980).^{[citation needed]}

Awards

• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa (1993)^[5]
• Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (1999)
• Prize of the Polish Ministry of National Education for Research Excellence (2000)
• Prize of the Polish Ministry of National Education for Outstanding Team Research (2003)^[6]