Freya Blekman elected to Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities

30 March 2026

Photo: Zoltan Zsillasi / CERN

Freya Blekman in front of the CMS detector at CERN.

Quantum Universe principal investigator, DESY lead scientist, CMS communications leader, and University of Hamburg professor invited into prestigious Dutch national academy based on her research and science communication work

She’s a top (quark) scientist, a constant presence on science social media, and a distinguished professor of physics: now Freya Blekman can add another title to her name, as a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. The Society (abbreviated KHMW), which began in 1752, comprises approximately 950 members who contribute to both science and society. Blekman, who is the lead of CMS communications activities within the CERN-based international collaboration, is being honoured not only for her research work on searches for new physics in the top quark sector at CERN, but also for her extensive outreach activities.

Since joining the Quantum Universe Cluster of Excellence and DESY in 2021, Blekman has become a prominent figure on the campus. As a lead scientist and prominent member of CMS‘ research group, she conducts extensive research work at CERN in Geneva, where she investigates possible clues that deviate from the Standard Model of Particle Physics at the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS experiment. But her presence on campus is also thanks to her work on social media, both in her private accounts on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Instagram, and (formerly) X/Twitter, and also her contributions to the popular @cmsatdesy Instagram account. Blekman, who was a professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel before coming to Hamburg , has consistently found science communication to be an invaluable part of her work. (Blekman continues to be a visiting professor in Brussels and at the University of Oxford.)

“I come from a university system where even bachelor students are already expected to do science communication,” Blekman says. “I enjoyed it. A lot. During my career, depending on the career stage, I focused more or less on it.”

That’s not an easy ask to focus on communication in academia. “When I was a postdoc, I was like any other in such a position: I was advised not to do outreach by my boss.” When she became a professor, she made it a major part of her work, and even made the decision to move to DESY from Brussels in order to better focus on both research and communication – not only out of a passion for it, but having seen a need. “I started to meet with scientists from other disciplines, and I was actually surprised by how little they knew about our field, particle physics,” she says. “Obviously, we were not reaching them. The biologists, the astronomers, they had no idea what we were doing, and I found that very, very bad.”

Today, Blekman makes science communication a major priority not only for herself, but also for young scientists in the CMS group at DESY. On the @cmsatdesy Instagram channel, doctoral students and postdocs make frequent appearances next to staff scientists and leading figures in the collaboration. That is by design: “I think it is very important that early career researchers are trained in these skills,” Blekman says. “That’s one of the reasons for the group Instagram. They have the opportunity to practice these skills in a relatively low-threshold environment, while still reaching a lot of people.” The Instagram channel regularly reaches between 50,000 and 60,000 users every month.

That outreach work has given Blekman a platform in the public sphere, which is where she has attracted the attention of the KHMW. “What I really look forward to is to spread the ideas of particle physics, which are quite special as far as collaboration, vision, and science for peace goes.”

Beyond being invited to one of the top academic academies in the Netherlands, what is Blekman’s science communication highlight? “When you start meeting people five years later who decided to study physics because of a talk you gave, or from your social media – in the end, because of you – it’s very, very surreal.”