Academic biography

John Costello is Emeritus (Full) Professor of Physics in the School of Physical Sciences at DCU and a founding member of the National Centre for Plasma Science and Technology. He served as Head of the School of Physics from 2004 to 2009, Associate Dean (Research/Acting) from 2009 to 2011 and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Heatlh 2011-2016. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Chartered Physicist as well as a Member of the European Physical Society. He is the recipient of the 2017 DCU President’s Research Award and the 2023 Richard O’Kennedy (Overall Winner) award of the Faculty of Science and Health. He has supervised 27 research students to completion (currently supervising 4 PhD students) and was the Coordinator and Lead PI of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Programme ‘EXTATIC’ that funded (and led to) 30 further PhD graduates in EUV and X-ray science between 2012 and 2022 across the seven partner universities. His research interests lie mainly in intense laser matter interactions with a special interest in laser plasma generation and photoionization processes, most recently in EUV and X-ray Free Electron Laser (FEL) fields. He was one of the very first people internationally to gain competitive access to the world-leading facility, the FLASH FEL at DESY, Hamburg when it first opened to users in 2005 and also to the LCLS X-ray FEL in Stanford when it opened in 2009. He and his collaborators have since made many of the seminal contributions to atomic physics with FELs. These include four FEL papers in the foremost physics journal Physical Review Letters and seven in Nature titles. He was the lead editor for a Special Issue of The Journal of Modern Optics on FELs in 2016 (Vol. 63, No. 4). He is a member of the UK EPSRC Peer Review College and has served on/is currently serving on the advisory boards of a number of international research institutes and conferences. He has organized a number of conferences including most recently, the 24th International Conference on Spectral Line Shapes (https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/1742-6596/1289/1) in 2018 and co-coordinated the 2020 AAMOS (IIT/IISER Tirupati - http://www.iisertirupati.ac.in/aamos20). He has also served on the EPS-EGAS board and a number of Institute of Physics committees in addition to the Irish Government Task Force for the Physical Sciences. He was formerly Chair of the Euratom Fusion Development Association Contract for Ireland. He has been visiting scientist for various periods (up to 6 months) annually since 1987 at various international institutes and research facilities that have included, N.I.S.T. (USA), BESSY (Berlin), DESY (Hamburg), RAL (UK), LCLS (Stanford), FERMI (Trieste) and MPIK (Heidelberg). John has published over 160 refereed journal papers (cited > 5,500 times on Web of Science and > 7,800 times on Google Scholar). He has also made over 300 conference/ workshop presentations on these topics including >50 invited talks at international conferences and workshops. He is member of the editorial board of Applied Sciences (MDPI) and formerly the Journal of Modern Optics (Taylor and Francis). He reviews proposals for many international funding agencies and has chaired and served on a number of EPSRC, DFG, NWO and other funding prioritisation panels. He served until recently as the Vice-Chair of the Peer Review Panel (PRP) for the new European X-ray FEL Small Quantum Systems facility in Hamburg (https://www.xfel.eu/facility/instruments/sqs/index_eng.html).