Stephen Parke is a New Zealand physicist. He is a distinguished scientist and former head of the Theoretical Physics Department at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Batavia, Illinois). Born in Gisborne, New Zealand, Parke attended Edmund Campion College, Gisborne and St Peter's College, Auckland. He did his undergraduate studies, mathematics and physics, at the University of Auckland in New Zealand where his mentor was Dan Walls. He obtained a Fulbright Travel Grant and was awarded a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship to attend graduate school at Harvard University. He was a graduate student of Sidney Coleman, obtaining a PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1980. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1980–1983) collaborating with Sidney Drell before moving to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as an Associate Scientist.

Field of work

He is an originator of Parke–Taylor amplitudes, which he developed with his colleague, Tomasz Taylor. Parke-Taylor amplitudes represent a new approach to computing scattering amplitudes in quantum chromodynamics using symmetry methods such as supersymmetry. Parke is also an expert on neutrino physics as well as the physics of the top quark.