Nikos Varelas, PhD
Senior Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Student Success, and Effectiveness and LAS Distinguished Professor of Physics
Physics
Contact
Building & Room:
2134 SES
Address:
845 West Taylor St.
Office Phone:
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About
Nikos Varelas is Senior Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Student Success, and Effectiveness and Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics. Prof. Varelas’ research field is experimental high energy particle physics. His research interests concentrate on precision measurements of Quantum Chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong interaction responsible for the nuclear force; searches for more fundamental building blocks of matter beyond the quarks and leptons in the Standard Model; searches for large extra spatial dimensions, quantum black holes, dark matter; and on studies of the Higgs boson. Prof. Varelas is currently working on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. He was a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. His group's technical contributions at CMS have centered on the development and operations of the Level-1 Calorimeter and High-Level Trigger Systems.
Prof. Varelas has served as the co-spokesperson of the Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD (CTEQ) Collaboration, member of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields, Chair of the Fermilab Users Executive Committee, and Senior Fellow of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab.
Prof. Varelas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a University of Illinois Scholar. He currently serves as the President of the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities and a member of the Board of Directors for Noble Schools in Chicago.
Selected Publications
- Hikasa, M. Tanabashi, K. Terashi, and N. Varelas, “Review Chapter on Searches for Quark and Lepton Compositeness,” Review of Particle Physics, R. L. Workman et al. (Particle Data Group), Prog. Theor. Exp. Phys. 2022, 083C01 (2022).
- M. Sirunyan et al. [CMS Collaboration], “Search for new physics in dijet angular distributions using proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV and constraints on dark matter and other models,” Eur. Phys. J. C 78, no.9, 789 (2018).
- Khachatryan et al. [CMS Collaboration], “The CMS trigger system,” JINST 12 (2017) no.01, P01020.
- Chatrchyan et al. [CMS Collaboration], “Search for the standard model Higgs boson produced in association with a W or a Z boson and decaying to bottom quarks,” Phys. Rev. D 89, 012003 (2014).
- Chatrchyan et al. [CMS Collaboration], “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC,” Phys. Lett. B 716, 30 (2012).
- Chatrchyan et al. [CMS Collaboration], “Determination of Jet Energy Calibration and Transverse Momentum Resolution in CMS,” JINST 6, P11002 (2011).
- Khachatryan et al. [CMS Collaboration], “Measurement of Dijet Angular Distributions and Search for Quark Compositeness in pp Collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 201804 (2011).
Education
PhD, Physics (1994), University of Rochester
BS, Physics (1985), University of Athens