Rate My Professor Kevin Varvell

Professor Kevin Varvell is Professor of Experimental Particle Physics in the School of Physics, Faculty of Science, at the University of Sydney. He completed his undergraduate degree at The University of Western Australia and earned his DPhil in Physics from the University of Oxford between 1980 and 1984. Following his PhD, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Birmingham from 1984 to 1990, the University of Liverpool, and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation at Menai from 1992 to 1996. Varvell joined the University of Sydney in 1997 as a staff member and has progressed to his current professorial role. He serves as Director of the University of Sydney Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale and is a member of the Particle Physics Research Group.

Varvell's research specializations center on experimental particle physics. Throughout his career, he has contributed to six international experiments at major facilities including CERN, Fermilab, and KEK. His current efforts focus on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, involving Higgs boson searches and beyond-Standard-Model physics, as well as the Belle II experiment at Japan's SuperKEKB electron-positron collider, studying B meson decays and rare processes. He has supervised PhD theses on topics such as Higgs decays to tau leptons and B to pi l nu decays. Varvell has participated in ARC-funded projects and international collaborations, including the 2019 University of Copenhagen Partnership Collaboration Award for machine learning applications in ATLAS particle hunting. His extensive publication record in high-energy physics journals underscores his influence in advancing detector technologies, data analysis, and fundamental particle discoveries. He has also engaged in public outreach through lectures at the Royal Society of New South Wales.