Rate My Professor Themis Bowcock

Professor Themis Bowcock is a Professor of Physics in the School of Physical Sciences within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Liverpool. He served as Head of Particle Physics at the university from 2011 to 2019. An experimental particle physicist, his career includes positions at Harvard University and Texas A&M University in the United States. He earned a BA in Physics from New College, Oxford (1978–1981) and a PhD in experimental particle physics from Queen Mary College, University of London (1981–1984). He is a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and co-founded the AiMeS institute in 2004.

Professor Bowcock led the design and construction of key detector systems for the LHCb experiment at CERN, including three generations of the VELO detector, which has enabled critical measurements of B meson decays and the discovery of new forms of matter such as tetraquarks and pentaquarks. Earlier work included contributions to the DELPHI experiment with precision measurements of B-lifetimes and WW couplings. He has been involved in experiments at CERN, Fermilab, and in Japan and Canada, including the LHCb upgrade, the g-2 experiment at Fermilab, T2K, DUNE, and initiatives in quantum technologies for dark energy measurements as well as the LZ experiment for dark matter. In 2023, he received the James Chadwick Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for his contributions to the design, construction, and operation of major detector and computing systems in particle physics. He has also held roles as Visiting Chair at University College Dublin (2008) and CERN Scientific Associate (2009).