Institute of Physics in the context of Professional qualifications in the United Kingdom

Professional titles are used to signify a person's professional role or to designate membership in a professional society. Professional titles in the anglophone world are usually used as a suffix following the person's name, such as John Smith, Esq., and are thus termed post-nominal letters. However, many European countries use prenominal letters such as Eur Ing. In the UK, many professional titles are 'chartered' such as Chartered Engineer or Chartered Physicist.

Under the European professional qualification directives, holders of professional titles in one member state are entitled to recognition of their title in all other member states.Once a person achieves professional certification in a given area of study, they have undergone examination by some form of governing body or professional association that is willing to assure the candidates competence in the given field of knowledge. In most cases, a certificate is issued for a set duration of time, at which the candidate must recertify with the same governing body.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (/bɜːrˈnɛl/; née Bell; born 15 July 1943) is a Northern Irish physicist who, while conducting research for her doctorate, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. This discovery later earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, but she was not among the awardees.

Bell Burnell was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011. She was Chancellor of the University of Dundee from 2018 to 2023.

Anton Zeilinger (German: [ˈanton ˈtsaɪlɪŋɐ]; born 20 May 1945) is an Austrian quantum physicist and Nobel laureate in physics of 2022. Zeilinger is professor of physics emeritus at the University of Vienna and senior scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Most of his research concerns the fundamental aspects and applications of quantum entanglement.

In 2007, Zeilinger received the first Inaugural Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics, London, for "his pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information". In October 2022, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and John Clauser for their work involving experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.