Welcome

Hi! I’m Thomas, a final-year PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) at MIT. My research—at the PSFC, under the supervision of Prof. Jack Hare—revolves around astrophysically-relevant fundamental plasma physics. Right now, I’m designing and conducting novel experiments to study experimental pulsed-power driven magnetic reconnection in the presence of a guide field, on machines such as PUFFIN, MAIZE, and COBRA. This research will help us better understand the underlying physics behind the mechanisms that drive massive explosions—coronal mass ejections—on the surface of the sun! Generally speaking, my research interests lie at the intersection of plasma physics, laboratory astrophysics, astrophysics (the won’t-fit-in-a-lab kind), optical diagnostics, and instrumentation. If I can get my hands dirty in the lab, and design some brand-new hardware to do it, I’m in.

Before/after long-exposure images taken of my tilted exploding wire array experiments on the COBRA facility at Cornell University. In the second picture, the image is entirely lit by glowing plasma, over ~100-billionths of a second!

I’m currently anticipating graduating in Fall 2026, with a PhD in Nuclear Science and Engineering, and a minor in Photography and Related Media. A fast learner and skilled at hands-on problem-solving/making, with optics and pulsed-power engineering knowledge, I’m looking for exciting opportunities to combine my technical and creative skills. Please reach out if you are interested in talking!

Photo Credit: Gretchen Ertl.

In 2021, I completed my undergraduate MSci degree in Physics at Imperial College London. For my final-year MSci research project, I worked alongside Dr. David Clements (Imperial), Dr. Chris Pearson (RAL), and Xinni Wu (Imperial) on data from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory to study the evolution of dusty star-forming galaxies. The Herschel mission has long since been decommissioned (2009–2013), so we applied some fancy statistical techniques to squeeze out as much science as possible from the legacy observations. Our first two papers from this researchannouncing the deepest-ever far-infrared observations made by the Herschel Space Observatory have been published—and heavily featured by 24 online news outlets—in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) Journal! You can view a list of my academic publications here.

Outside of physics, I enjoy photography (particularly with film), gaming, baking, knitting, art, crafting… and generally making things! You can find my photography portfolio here: photo.thomasvarnish.co.uk, including some of my published work.

For a summary of my CV, click here. If you’d like more detail, please see my LinkedIn page for a more complete profile.

I created this website from scratch as a side project. It's built upon GitHub Pages and the Jekyll static-site framework, but all the HTML and CSS you see here was custom-written. All the code can be found on my GitHub, so feel free to take a look if you're interested!