Energy academic conferred associate professor title
International physics competition success for Oriel student
22 July 2026
Oriel Physics student Parkin Pham finished third in the international finals of the PLANCKS physics competition in Eindhoven
Parkin Pham (left) with the rest of the team that finished third at PLANCKS. Photo by PLANCKS
Competing against 53 teams from 28 countries, the joint team from the University of Oxford and Imperial College London finished within two percent of the top spot.
The team of four sat a two-hour exam working through 10 questions at Eindhoven University of Technology and won £200 for their third-place finish.
“We were quite surprised,” Pham said, explaining that they didn’t expect to do so well in the competition.
The problems the teams faced are written by professors and cover different fields of physics, including questions about cradles, glaciers, particle physics, slinkies and graphene.
It’s the first time Pham has competed in a physics competition and he’s keen to do more in the future.
“What I enjoy about physics is it’s the subject where you get to take real-world problems and condense them down into numbers and logic systematically to figure out an approach to solve these problems,” he said.
“You have real-world concrete problems that you can visualise, but you can also get objective logical answers to these problems.”
The 2027 edition of the competition is to be held in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.