Paul Newman is the leader of the Birmingham Particle Physics Group and Director of Research for the School of Physics & Astronomy.

His main areas of expertise are deep inelastic scattering, the quark and gluon sub-structure of protons and nuclei and the behaviour of gluons at very high densities. He investigates these topics experimentally through the study of 'diffractive' electron-proton and proton-proton collisions in which one or more protons stays intact.

Paul is currently working on collisions between ultra-high energy protons detected by the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, including the study of photon-photon collisions using protons reconstructed in the AFP forward spectrometer. He is also investigating future possibilities for electron-proton and electron-ion collisions at the Electron Ion Collider (EIC), which is being planned for Brookhaven Laboratory, as well as through the LHeC project at CERN.