Professor Burchell has published over 200 journal papers and given more than 100 research talks at conferences and meetings. He is a member of the American Physical Society and of the Meteoritical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. From 2006-2008 and again from 2008-2010 he was Chair of the Astrobiology Society of Britain. He has sat on the organising committees (local and scientific) of several scientific conferences, and has helped to organise many one-day meetings at the Royal Astronomy Society (London), the most recent being in November 2018 (Cosmic Dust, main organiser Dr Wozniakiewicz). He was the main organiser of the 14th Hypervelocity Impact Symposium held at Kent in 2017.

Research interests
Professor Burchell’s research is in hypervelocity impacts, the very violent events typical of Solar System impacts. Using the department’s two-stage light gas gun he can achieve impact speeds in the laboratory of over 8 km/s.