Prof. Simon Connell — Founder & Chair of The African Light Source

For more than two decades, one physicist has carried a single, audacious idea from the margins of conference corridors to the agenda of the African Union: that Africa should build and own its own synchrotron light source. That physicist is Prof. Simon Henry Connell — founder and chair of The African Light Source.

Simon Connell is a Professor of Physics at the University of Johannesburg, where he sits within the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. His scientific home is experimental physics in its broadest sense — spanning particle and nuclear physics, diamond and quantum physics, applied nuclear physics, advanced instrumentation and high-performance computing. He is a founding member of South Africa’s participation in the ATLAS experiment at CERN, contributing to the search for physics beyond the Standard Model, and he has spent years as a user of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble — the experience that would convince him of how transformative a light source of Africa’s own could be.

From the lab bench to a continental cause

Connell earned both his BSc and his PhD (1985–1989) at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he then built his research career until moving to the University of Johannesburg in 2008. Along the way he served as President of the South African Institute of Physics and led the high-profile MinPET project — a world-first application of nuclear-physics imaging to detect diamonds inside rock in real time, recognised with a national innovation award.

But it is the synchrotron that has become his defining mission. A synchrotron is a stadium-sized accelerator that produces light billions of times brighter than the sun, light that lets scientists study matter atom by atom. More than seventy such facilities operate around the world — and not one of them is in Africa. African researchers who need synchrotron light have always had to travel abroad to do their best work. Connell set out to change that.

Founding The African Light Source

Conversations about an African synchrotron had drifted through the community since around 2000, but it was Connell who gave them structure and momentum. He chaired the organising committee of the first African Light Source Conference and Workshop, held in November 2015 at the ESRF in Grenoble. Ninety-eight delegates from thirteen African nations — alongside partners from the world’s major light sources — produced the landmark Grenoble Resolutions, which:

• established a continent-wide AfLS Steering Committee with both a large African and a global footprint;
• set out a staged roadmap toward the ultimate establishment of the facility; and
• created the African Light Source Foundation, registered in South Africa, to carry the work forward.

As chair of the AfLS Foundation, Connell has since steered a programme of conferences, workshops and tutorials that knit together a community of scientists, students and institutions across the continent. Under his leadership the initiative has advanced on four connected fronts — the technical roadmap and Conceptual Design Report, the training and mobility of a new generation of African synchrotron scientists, the conferences and schools that build momentum, and the science diplomacy that has won political backing, including a 2018 call from the African Union’s executive council for member states to support a pan-African synchrotron.

Putting the case on the record

Connell has also led the effort to document the case for the facility in the scientific literature, co-authoring the foundational review “Towards an African Light Source” (2019) and, more recently, “The African Light Source: history, context and future” in the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation (2024). These papers lay out the research the facility would enable — from medicine and structural biology to materials, energy, agriculture, palaeontology and cultural heritage — and the staged, collaborative path, modelled in part on the Middle East’s SESAME synchrotron, by which a developing region can build a world-class light source of its own.

Recognition

Connell’s scientific standing has been widely recognised. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa (2006), a Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences (2018). His honours range from the British Association Medal (Silver) in 1994 to a National Science and Technology Forum award in 2022 for the MinPET project. In 2025 he shared the American Physical Society’s John Wheatley Award — which honours outstanding contributions to the development of physics in developing countries — with Gihan Kamel and Sekazi Mtingwa, a recognition tied directly to the African Light Source effort.

The road ahead

Building a synchrotron is the work of more than a decade, with a construction cost on the order of a billion dollars and an annual operating budget to match. Connell is candid about the scale of the challenge — the funding, the accelerator-physics expertise still to be grown on the continent, the governance to be aligned. Yet the trajectory he set in Grenoble continues: a roadmap, a foundation, a Conceptual Design Report in progress, and a continental community that did not exist before. The African Light Source is, above all, a long game — and Simon Connell has been its most persistent player.