Philip N. Burrows

Philip Nicholas Burrows (born 1964) is a professor of Physics and the director of the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science at the University of Oxford. A former council member, Fellow, and Chartered Physicist of the Institute of Physics of the UK and Ireland, he is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He chairs both the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider Collaboration Board and also the CERN Scientific Policy Committee.

Personal life and education The son of Nicholas Burrows and Winifred Coyle, Philip Burrows is married to Laura Abrar, and they have one son, Louis.

Burrows earned a Bachelor of Arts Honors Degree in physics at Oriel College, Oxford between 1982 and 1985, and a Master of Arts at Oxford University in 1989. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in particle physics there from 1985 to 1988. Burrows' dissertation, QCD Processes and Hadron Production in High-Energy e+e− Annihilation, was advised by Michael G. Bowler.

Career The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hired Burrows as a Principal Research Scientist, based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), from 1989 to 1998. Burrows was an Advanced Fellow at the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council from 1998 to 2002, as well as Senior Physics Tutor, Pembroke College, Oxford from 1999 to 2003.

Burrows was associate director of the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science from 2007 to 2018, and in 2008 he was an Erskine Fellow at Canterbury University, in New Zealand.

In 2014, Burrows advocated for advanced planning for the eventual replacement of the Large Hadron Collider: But with the LHC due to go out of service before 2040, there is no time to waste in planning its replacement, according to Philip Burrows, a senior research fellow in physics at Oxford University. "Since the gestation time for big accelerators is a couple of decades, we need to start thinking now if we want to have a new machine come online in the late 2030s," he says.

From 2017 to 2019 he was a guest professor of the Director General at CERN. From 2018 to 2020 he became interim director of Oxford's John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, and since 2020 he has served as director there. From October 2021 to September 2025 he served as an elected general trustee of the IOP. The HL-LHC project's goal is "to increase the performance of the LHC in order to increase the potential for discoveries after 2029... to increase the integrated luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC's design value." which "plays a central advisory role, providing objective and impartial guidance to the CERN Council on all aspects of CERN's scientific programme". Burrows joined Gianluigi Arduini and Jacqueline Keintzel in comparing seven proposals, "as options for CERN’s next large-scale collider project: CLIC, FCC-ee, FCC-hh, LCF, LEP3, LHeC and a muon collider".

Awards and honors Burrows became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2004, The Institute noted, "For the last 20 years he [Burrows] has led development of the design, engineering and technology required for advanced particle accelerators and beamlines."

He was a trustee of the UK and Ireland Institute of Physics from October 2021 to September 2025. for "exceptional dedication, empathy, and unwavering support for his students".

Selected publications

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