The 2017 EPS HEP Outreach Prize is awarded to Michael Hoch for initiatives highlighting the conceptual and physical beauty of high-energy physics, and the inspirational qualities that are common to both Art and Science.
Michael Hoch is at the origin of the art@CMS project, an innovative education and outreach program that he created in 2012 around the topic of the LHC collisions detected by the CMS experiment. Over the years, this single-person project has grown in to a solid concept in the field of high-energy physics, with worldwide events and exhibitions on an almost weekly basis. In several countries, the project has appeared on the most prestigious exhibition platforms, venues that rarely feature scientific outreach programs.
The project also includes interdisciplinary Science & Art workshops that enable young people and artists to gain a better understanding of science and to be inspired and encouraged by it. By involving people in the act of creation itself, Michael Hoch takes the project beyond the level of merely being an exhibition, and fully embraces the two-way communication concept implicit in the word “outreach”. Over the years, around a thousand students, professional art teachers and artists have participated in these workshops around the world.
