Stephen Parke

Stephen Parke is a New Zealand-American theoretical physicist. He is a distinguished scientist and former head (2010–2015) of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Batavia, Illinois.

Born in Gisborne, New Zealand, Parke attended Campion College, Gisborne and St Peter's College, Auckland. He did his undergraduate studies, mathematics and physics, at the University of Auckland in New Zealand where his mentor was Dan Walls. He obtained a Fulbright Travel Grant and was awarded a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship to attend graduate school at Harvard University. He was a graduate student of Sidney Coleman, obtaining a PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1980. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1980–1983) collaborating with Sidney Drell before moving to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as an Associate Scientist. He became an APS fellow in 1996 and in 2018 he was awarded a Doctorate of Science from the University of Auckland for his work on "Amplitudes in Gauge Theories". Parke's Erdos number is 3, having written papers with both Sidney Coleman and mathematician Terence Tao.