Jonathan Mark Butterworth is a professor of physics at University College London (UCL) working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). His popular science book Smashing Physics, (available as "Most Wanted Particle" in Canada and the USA) which tells the story of the search for the Higgs boson, was published in 2014 and his newspaper column / blog Life and Physics is published by The Guardian.

Early life and education Butterworth was raised in Manchester and educated at Wright Robinson High School in Gorton and Shena Simon Sixth Form College. He studied physics at the University of Oxford, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in particle physics in 1992. His PhD research used the ZEUS particle detector to investigate R-parity violating supersymmetry at the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, and was supervised by Doug Gingrich and Herbert K. Dreiner.

Research and career After completing his PhD, Butterworth spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher for Pennsylvania State University, primarily working in Hamburg on ZEUS. He joined the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL in 1995, serving as head of department from 2011 to 2018, and was appointed Professor of Physics in 2015.

Butterworth works on particle physics, particularly the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. His research investigates what nature is like at the smallest distances and the highest energies – the fundamental physical laws. This tells us about the physics which was most important in the first few moments after the Big Bang. His research collaborators include Brian CoxAnon (2015) published by the Royal Institution, London and Jeff Forshaw and he has supervised or co-supervised several successful PhD students to completion on the ATLAS experiment, ZEUS and HERA.

Butterworth frequently discusses physics in public, including talks at the Royal Institution and the Wellcome Trust and appearances on Newsnight, Horizon, Channel 4 News, Al Jazeera, and BBC Radio 4's Today Programme and The Infinite Monkey Cage. He appeared with Gavin Salam in the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) documentary Colliding Particles - Hunting the Higgs, which follows a team of physicists trying to find the Higgs Boson.

His research has been funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Royal Society. In 2026 he spoke publicly about the potential impacts of significant funding cuts from STFC in PPAN (Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics) research, including the cancellation of £250 million of planned investment into four major infrastructure projects amid overall annual budget cuts of around 30% (which he described as "catastrophic"), which could lead to hundreds of PhD and postdoctoral positions being cut, affecting the financial viability of physics departments within UK universities. Butterworth later gave evidence to the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee about the proposed budget cuts, particularly the impact on early-career researchers and on the position and standing of the UK within large international PPAN collaborations, saying "we have international meetings coming up at the end of the month where our name is going to be mud if this is not sorted out".

Butterworth was a member of the STFC Council from April 2021 to March 2025, and has served on the governing council of UCL since 2021. In July 2026, Butterworth was elected President of the Institute of Physics, starting in the role from October 2026.

Bibliography

Smashing Physics (2014) A Map of the Invisible (2017)

Awards and honours Butterworth was awarded a prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2009 One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: and shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2015 for his book Smashing Physics, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year by Physics World in 2014. He was awarded the James Chadwick Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics (IOP) in 2013. His citation at the IOP reads:

References