Jean Cleymans

Jean Cleymans (5 August 1944—22 February 2021) 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.

Jean Cleymans died in an accident in his hometown Turnhout on February 22, 2021.

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

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, he was instrumental in establishing the South Africa-CERN programme, the successor to the UCT-CERN Research Centre. Over the years he supervised 24 MSc and 17 PhD students. He was member of the editorial board of the MDPI journal Physics and he served as chairman of the South Africa-CERN Programme.

Family Cleymans was married to Ria (Maria) since 1968, they have two daughters Sylvie (1969-2021) and Silke (1980).

Awards Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa (1993) 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)