Professor Kenneth Johns is a prominent and widely published particle physicist. With the D0experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron in Chicago, he was part of the team that discovered the top quark in 1995. For this discovery, the D0 experimenters, including Johns, were awarded the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society in 2019. With theATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, he was part of the team that discovered in the Higgs boson in 2012. The discovery of the Higgs boson is recognized as one of the most important discoveries in fundamental physics and this discovery by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN LHC was acknowledged in the Nobel Prize citation for F.Englert and P. Higgs in 2013. Johns and the UA experimental particle physics group were awarded the Galileo Circle Dean's Award by the College of Science in 2013 for their collaborative work on ATLAS.

Johns and his international, national, and UA-based teams have published extensively, with more than 700 scholarly articles since 2013. While at the UA, the research group of Johns has included over 70 undergraduate researchers, 18 Ph.D. research assistants, and 9 post-doctoral fellows and his research program greatly benefited from their achievements.

Simply put, the research goals of Professor Johns are to discover the fundamental particles and forces in the universe. His current research involves searching for particles beyond theStandard Model using the ATLAS experiment. His team is looking for new physics that produces four-top quarks and searching for new long-lived particles that decay in the ATLAS detector. Aunique contribution of Johns and his UA team was to design, build, and test one million channels of electronics for new muon detectors in ATLAS. His team has also started developing firmware for the Liquid Argon calorimeter readout and for tracking charged particles as part of future ATLAS experiment upgrades.

In addition to his research expertise, Johns is passionate about teaching. He has taught at all levels in the Physics Department. Two important areas in this teaching involve using and advocating for active-learning instruction and mentoring science and engineering students in scientific inquiry. He was recognized as a top educator by the Professor Leon and Pauline Blitzer Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Physics and Related Sciences in Spring 2014. He also received several awards from the Department of Physics for his excellence in teaching undergraduate and graduate physics.