Kostas Nikolopoulos obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Athens (Greece) in 2010. His thesis was awarded the Marc Virchaux prize. Subsequently, he joined the Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA) as a post-doctoral research associate, and since 2012 he is a Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow at University of Birmingham.
He was heavily involved in the H→ZZ*→4l analysis already before the LHC start-up, developing the tools and strategies that were used in the actual data analysis. In October 2010 he was appointed convener of the ATLAS H → ZZ group, consisting of more than 100 physicists. His term of office was exceptionally extended for a second year and he led the group to the discovery of Higgs boson-like particle in July 2012. He then focused on the study of the properties of the Higgs boson with emphasis on the mass, production rates, and couplings. This culminated in several publications establishing the Standard Model-like character of the observed Higgs boson. Furthermore, he is interested in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model in the Higgs sector; both through the search for additional Higgs boson and through anomalous decays of the observed Higgs boson. In October 2014, he was elected ATLAS UK Physics coordinator.
Kostas is co-investigator on the Birmingham Particle Physics grant from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). In recent years he has also received funding in support of his work from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (FP7 and H2020), the Royal Society, and the Durham Institute of Particle Physics Phenomenology.