Herwig Schopper was Director-General of CERN from 1981 to 1988, during which time the Large Electron Positron collider was approved and constructed

Carlo Rubbia’s name is closely related to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. In 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Simon van der Meer, for the work he had done as head of the UA1 collaboration

Ted Wilson was involved in the design of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and played a leading role in its commissioning

Violette Brisson played an active part in the discovery of neutral currents; she was head of the Gargamelle group at the Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris

Kjell Johnsen was Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) project leader when the accelerator was built

Georges Charpak received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1968 invention of the multi-wire proportional chamber, which revolutionised particle detection

Helge Ravn was part of the ISOLDE group from the beginning. When ISOLDE began operations at CERN in 1967, it was unique in the world

Paolo Zanella came to the CERN computing group in 1962, just a few years after the first computer had arrived

Madeleine Znoy was one of the people responsible for “scanning” the films from the bubble chambers for interesting events

Francis Farley, a British physicist, joined CERN in 1957. This marked the start of a long and remarkable career in experiments to measure the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon

Günther Plass, former Director of Accelerators at CERN, joined the Magnets group at the Proton Synchrotron (PS) in 1956. Three years later, the machine went into service and became the most powerful accelerator in the world