François, Baron Englert

François, Baron Englert (born 6 November 1932) is a Belgian theoretical physicist best known for his pioneering work on the mechanism that explains how subatomic particles acquire mass, a discovery for which he shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Higgs. In 1964, Englert, along with his colleague Robert Brout, proposed the spontaneous symmetry-breaking mechanism in gauge theories that gives mass to weak force bosons while preserving other symmetries, a theoretical framework now called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism and foundational to the Standard Model of particle physics.

Born in Etterbeek, a municipality of Brussels, to Polish Jewish immigrants, Englert survived the Nazi occupation of Belgium during World War II by concealing his Jewish identity with the aid of non-Jewish families. He earned a degree in electrical-mechanical engineering from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1955, followed by a master's in physics in 1958 and a PhD in 1959, initially working as a research assistant to support his studies. From 1959 to 1960 as a research associate and from 1960 to 1961 as an assistant professor at Cornell University in the United States, where he collaborated on early work in quantum field theory.

François Englert was born on 6 November 1932 in Etterbeek, a municipality of Brussels, Belgium, to a Jewish family of Polish immigrants who had arrived in the country in 1924 seeking better economic opportunities and to escape rising anti-Semitism.

His parents originated from a modest background of Polish Jews and established a textile shop in Brussels upon their arrival, which provided the family with a stable and decent livelihood in the years leading up to World War II.

His Jewish heritage would later pose profound challenges during the war.