Konstantin Matchev headshot

Konstantin Matchev

Professor

Education

  • PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1997
Short bio: 

Prof. Konstantin Matchev received his undergraduate degree in Physical Engineering in 1990 (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria) and his PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1997 (Johns Hopkins University, advisor Jonathan Bagger). He was a postdoc in the particle theory groups at Fermilab (1997-2000) and CERN (2000-2002) and a faculty member in the Physics Department of the University of Florida (2002-2024). He joins the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Alabama in 2025.

Major awards and distinctions: Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator (2004), University of Florida PhD Advisor/Mentoring Award (2012), Fellow of the American Physical Society (2015), University of Florida Postdoc Mentoring Award (2017), University of Florida Research Foundation Professor (2018-21), University of Florida Term Professor (2018-21), Inaugural Endowed Shelby Distinguished Professor, University of Alabama (2025).

 

Research Interests:
Prof. Matchev’s research interests include elementary particle physics (since 2002 he has been a member of the CMS experimental collaboration which in 2012 discovered the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN), dark matter physics, new theories beyond the Standard Model, and the related Monte Carlo simulation and statistical data analysis techniques. Recently he has branched out into the areas of exoplanet spectroscopy (a team of his students won the Ariel Machine Learning Exoplanet Data Challenge at the 2022 NeurIPS conference) and the theory and practice of machine learning and quantum computing.