The Physics Centre at the University of Essex opened August 1st 2001 and has a number of members and associate members of the former Department of Physics. These members continue to have an involvement in theoretical physics research, conference activities and writing of papers and books, but the centre is not responsible for any experimental work and members will not be supervising students within the Physics Centre.

There is an Applied Physics group in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering which continues to undertake physics-related research and to supervise graduate students on PhD programmes.