I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Physics Department of the University of Oxford and a Kurti Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College.

I'm an experimental particle physicist and a member of the ATLAS Collaboration, which uses high-energy proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to try to understand the fundamental nature of the Universe and everything in it. 

Stipendiary Lecturer, St. Hilda's College

I teach undergraduate courses in quantum mechanics, relativity, and mathematical methods for physics students.

My research currently focuses on using the Higgs boson (discovered fairly recently in 2012) as a tool to look for new particles and interactions outside the Standard Model of physics. For example, searches for particles which interact only with the Higgs weren't possible until the last few years.

Specific projects I've worked on recently include searches for decays of the Higgs into "invisible" particles such as Dark Matter candidates (which has obvious connections with astrophysics/cosmology) and di-Higgs production, which is especially sensitive to the Higgs self-interaction as well as new particles that could be produced directly.

As a member of the ATLAS Collaboration, I'm an author of approximately 400 peer-reviewed articles, which I've obviously had varying degrees of personal involvement in. 

A few items most representative of my recent work are:

ATLAS Collaboration, Search for invisible Higgs boson decays in vector boson fusion at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector. Phys. Lett. B 793 (2019) 499. arXiv:1809.06682.

ATLAS Collaboration, Constraints on mediator-based dark matter and scalar dark energy models using √s = 13 TeV pp collisions at the LHC with the ATLAS detector. JHEP 05 (2019) 142. arXiv:1903.01400.

W. Balunas, A Search for Nothing: Dark Matter and Invisible Decays of the Higgs Boson at the ATLAS

Detector. Ph.D. Thesis, 2018. CERN-THESIS-2018-039.

W. Balunas, ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition Upgrades for High Luminosity LHC. Proceedings

of the 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics. PoS(ICHEP2016)858.