Brian Foster is an experimental particle physicist whose work has centered on electron-proton collisions at the HERA accelerator in DESY Hamburg and in the design of new accelerators, such as the International Linear Collider and plasma-based accelerators. He was educated at Wolsingham Secondary School, obtained a B.Sc. with First Class Honours at Queen Elizabeth College London, where he was also awarded the Dillon and Andrewes Prizes and a D. Phil degree from Oxford in 1978. Foster became a lecturer at Bristol in 1984 and Professor in 1996. He led the particle physics group there until 2003, subsequently becoming Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford University and Fellow of Balliol College. He was head of the Dept. of Particle Physics in Oxford from 2004 - 2011. In 2010 Foster was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship at the University of Hamburg and DESY. He is also Emeritus Professor of Physics at Bristol University.
Foster was Chairman of the European Committee for Future Accelerators from 2002 – 2005. He was a member of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council from 2001 - 2006. He was European Director for the International Linear Collider from 2006-2017. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 1999 and the Max Born Medal and Prize of the German Physical Society and the Institute of Physics in 2003. Foster is a Fellow of the UK Institute of Physics and was on its Council from 2008 - 2013. He was appointed Office of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen in 2003 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008. Foster chaired the Physics Panel of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework and was a member of its Main Panel B. He has been a member of the Council of the Royal Society since 2015. Foster is committed to public outreach and gives many public lectures every year.

Editorial Board

Barry C. Barish, California Institute of Technology
Fred Dylla, American Institute of Physics
Nathaniel Fisch, Princeton University
Richard Friend, University of Cambridge
Marsha I. Lester, University of Pennsylvania
Eric Priest, Montana State University
Jonathan Tennyson, University College London
Anthony W. Thomas, University of Adelaide
Meg Urry, Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics
Albrecht Wagner, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
Julia Yeomans, University of Oxford