John Derek Dowell FRS (born 6 January 1935) is a British physicist, emeritus professor at University of Birmingham.
Born in Leicestershire, he was educated at Coalville Grammar School and the University of Birmingham (BSc, PhD).
[citation needed] He published results from CERN's SPS accelerator which included the first observation in Europe of the J/psi particle, which consists of charmed quarks, supporting the theory that matter is composed of quarks.
After research at the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) at DESY in Hamburg, he helped develop detectors for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva and was involved in the ATLAS experiment which discovered the Higgs boson.
[3] In July 2002, a symposium was held in his honour, as he retired in September of that year.