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.[3]
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]
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,[6] he was instrumental in establishing the South Africa-CERN programme,[7] the successor to the UCT-CERN Research Centre.[5] He also contributed to the SA-Joint Institute for Nuclear Research with Russia and was Leader of the UCT-ALICE Collaboration at CERN.[5]
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.[8] Over the years he supervised 24 MSc and 17 PhD students.
Cleymans acted as referee for several journals and was listed as a distinguished EPJ referee in 2017.[9] He was member of the editorial board of the MDPI journal Physics[10] and he served as chairman of the South Africa-CERN Programme.[11]
Cleymans was married to Ria (Maria) since 1968, they have two daughters Sylvie (1969-2021) and Silke (1980).
