He is a founding member of the ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and served as its first spokesperson from 1991 to 2010. The ALICE collaboration, which today includes almost 2,000 scientists from over 170 Institutions in 40 countries, is dedicated to the study of matter at extreme energy densities (the ‘quark-gluon plasma’), which resembles the primordial matter in the early universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang.

He has served on several international scientific committees (NuPECC, NSAC, OECD-Megascience, ECFA) and institutional scientific councils (IPN Orsay, NIKHEF, BNL RHIC PAC, US NSAC, NBI Copenhagen), evaluates grants for national and European research agencies, and was for 24 years the associate editor of a physics journal (European Physics Journal C). In 2014 he received the Lise Meitner prize for Nuclear Science of the European Physical Society and in 2017 the Niels Bohr Medal of Honour from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark.

He is now Adjunct Professor at the University of Yale (New Haven, USA) and Affiliated Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute (University of Copenhagen, Denmark); he also was a Distinguished Professor at CCNU, Wuhan, China, from 2019 to 2022.