Physics

Stephen Blundell is a Professor of Physics and a Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. After studying physics and taking his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, he moved to Oxford as an EPSRC Fellow, and then took a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College. His research is in the area of magnetism and superconductivity, and he is particularly known for his contributions to the technique of muon-spin rotation, in which radioactive particles called muons are implanted into samples in order to study their magnetic properties. He has authored or co-authored six books with Oxford University Press, including Magnetism in Condensed Matter Concepts in Thermal Physics and Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics - work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor.

She has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now a Visiting Academic in Oxford, and the Chancellor of the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has chaired, served on, or serviced more Research Council Boards, Committees and Panels than she wishes to remember, and has also chaired a European Community Committee. She has been President of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics and in 2014 the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was one of the small group of women scientists that set up the Athena SWAN scheme.

She has received many honours, including, in 2018, a $3M Breakthrough Prize. She donated the money to the Institute of Physics to set up scholarships for graduate students from groups under-represented in Physics.

The public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster. In her spare time she gardens, listens to choral music and is active in the Quakers. She has co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme – ‘Dark Matter; Poems of Space’.

Current Projects

Professor Steve is currently working with Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), an experiment based in Canada which measures fundamental properties of neutrinos generated in the sun. A new experiment is being explored which will use neutrinos from a reactor to measure more such fundamental properties.

Steve is also investigating a new concept for ground-based, very high energy, gamma-ray observations to study some of the highest energy radiation produced by astrophysical objects.

Ana Sofia Carpinteiro Inacio is a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the Sub-department of Particle Physics and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Physics at Mansfield College. She obtained her PhD in Physics in 2022 from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her research focus on understanding the fundamental properties and behaviour of neutrinos with the SNO+ experiment.

Andrei Constantin is a Stephen Hawking Fellow in Theoretical Physics. After his doctorate at the University of Oxford he moved to Uppsala as a postdoctoral researcher and then returned back to Oxford. His research lies at the interface of string theory, algebraic geometry, and machine learning and focuses on developing mathematical and computational tools to study string theory and its implications for particle physics, cosmology and quantum gravity.

Benjamin Huddart is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in muon spectroscopy in condensed matter physics and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Physics at Mansfield College. He obtained his PhD at Durham University in 2020, where he also spent three years working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate before arriving in Oxford. His research concerns the use of the muon-spin spectroscopy technique to study the magnetic properties of materials. This technique relies on subatomic particles, called muons, that are implanted in a sample. Much of his work involves determining the location of the stopped muon in the system under study, a problem that can be addressed using a computational modelling technique called density functional theory.