Qaisar Shafi received his BSc and his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Imperial College, London. England. His PhD advisor was the late Abdus Salam who received the Nobel Prize for Theoretical Physics in 1979. After completing his PhD, Professor Shafi held prestigious postdoctoral and research fellowships including an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the Universities of Munich and Aachen, Germany, and a senior fellowship at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He also completed his Habilitation with venia legendi at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
He joined the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware in 1983. Throughout his career at the University of Delaware, Professor Shafi has maintained close ties to the ICTP (International Center for Theoretical Physics) in Trieste, Italy where he directed more than a dozen summer schools in High Energy Physics and Cosmology. He also (co-)directed a NATO school and several summer schools in High Energy Physics organized under BCSVPIN (an acronym denoting the countries Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Pakistan, and India), an international science network, founded in collaboration with Abdus Salam and Jogesh Pati, and continued by Professor Shafi.
Qaisar Shafi is an internationally recognized expert in Elementary Particle (High Energy) Physics and Cosmology; his current research areas include Higgs boson, supersymmetry, new physics at the LHC, dark matter particle, inflationary cosmology and primordial gravity waves, origin of matter in the universe and nature of dark energy. Professor Shafi has supervised a large number of postdoctoral fellows and PhD students, and created a global network of collaborators. Many of his former students and postdocs have become highly respected scientists in their home countries.
Professor Shafi is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and recipient of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt research prize, one of Germany’s leading research award. He was also awarded the Outstanding Scholar Award of the College of Arts and Science, University of Delaware.