Professor Dewi Meirion Lewis BSc, CPhys, PhD, DSc(Hon), FInstP, FLSW is a Welsh-speaking accelerator physicist with expertise with radioactive pharmaceuticals and has been an international physics consultant since 2013.
He was brought up In Harlech, North Wales before graduating at Swansea University in 1969 with a first-class honours degree in physics and was the first Swansea PhD student to carry out research on positrons, the antimatter of electrons. He was selected for the University of Wales student relief team that went to Aberfan on the first day of the mining disaster.
He became Science Fellow at CERN, the international physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland and later ‘engineer-in- charge’ of CERN’s first hadron collider - at that time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
He brought back his ‘accelerator’ expertise to UK industry with Amersham International plc. becoming Cyclotron Manager, Radiopharmaceuticals Business Manager and Vice President of Physics. He was one of the first Western scientists to enter the Soviet secret city of Chelyabimsk-65, eventually forming a JV company for radioisotopes. At GE HealthCare, he organised radiopharmaceutical clinical trials and in 2010, he returned to CERN as Industry Advisor to the Director General.
He was also a Research Council member for PPARC and CCLRC, and a member of EPSRC, MRC, REF and STFC panels plus a Trustee-Director of the Amersham/GE Pension Funds. In 1992 he established the Reactor Isotope Committee in Brussels and became Vice President of the European Industry Association for Nuclear Medicine.
In Wales, he was an External Advisor to PETIC in Cardiff, to ARTHUR the Welsh Government project for a radioisotope centre with a visiting Chair in Nuclear Medicine at Bangor University. At Swansea University, he has an honorary chair at the School of Sciences, and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science in 2019. He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
He was also one of two former Swansea students in the Geneva International rugby team that won the Swiss Championship Cup in 1978.