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Welcome

Hi! I’m Thomas, a fourth-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 studying experimental pulsed-power driven magnetic reconnection in the presence of a guide field, on machines such as PUFFIN, MAIZE, and COBRA. Generally speaking, my research interests lie at the intersection of plasma physics, laboratory astrophysics, astrophysics (the won’t-fit-in-a-lab kind), and instrumentation.

Brightly-coloured plasma is shown glowing outwards from two small tilted cylindrical arrays of thin carbon wires.

A long-exposure image taken of my tilted exploding wire array experiments on the MAIZE facility at the University of Michigan.

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 paper from this research has just been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) Journal!

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

For a summary of my CV, click here. If you’d like more detail, please see my LinkedIn page for a more complete (and up-to-date) profile.

If you’d like to contact me, feel free to send me an email.

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!