Scottish Graduate School in Physics

The SUPA Graduate School is staffed by a director, a secretary and an IT support Officer and provides postgraduate education and training for Scottish physicists. An integral component of the SUPA Graduate School is the Graduate School Management Committee (GSMC) which provides advice to the Graduate School Director regarding the development of the Graduate School.

The SUPA Graduate School was set up in early 2006. It runs an annual intensive postgraduate training programme for Scottish physicists. The intense programme consists of 60+ courses across seven technical themes. All SUPA partners actively engage with the Graduate School. In addition, the Graduate School programme includes inter-theme courses and transferable skills development - SUPA makes use of existing departmental, university and research council generic skills training.

The training is delivered by face-to-face sessions, utilising video-conferencing technology and on-line, by web-based training materials. However, where there is a need, courses are developed specifically for the Scottish physics community e.g. the targeted entrepreneurship module – which deals with marketing, IP, commercialisation, patents and networking in a physics context.

To facilitate the training and education of postgraduate Scottish physicists, the SUPA Graduate School has designed and built eight video conferencing training suites and a purpose built Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) called My.SUPA.

The SUPA Graduate School has in the region of 520 PhD students in physics, recruiting around 120 students per year across the eight SUPA alliance departments. Every year, the Graduate School runs a highly successful Prize Studentship Competition allocating fully funded prestigious Prize Studentships across the seven thematic areas of the alliance. This competition attracts top class international candidates and has grown significantly year on year as shown in the following table:

Prize Studentship Competition Statistics

Partnerships

• An Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) Doctoral Training Centre in Condensed Matter. A £6M, 5 year project with 50 doctoral studentships.
• The SUPA SFC SPIRIT project – INSPIRE, a £1.6M, 3 year project with 15 industrial studentships.
• An Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) Industrial Doctorate Centre in Optics and Photonics Technologies by providing access to the SUPA Graduate School video conferencing activities and staff expertise. A £5M, 5 year project with 50 doctoral studentships.
• Two new partnerships funded by EPSRC – a CDT Lite in the Application of Next Generation Accelerators and a CDT Lite in Magnetic Resonance Technology. Each £4M with studentships based in Strathclyde, St Andrews, Aberdeen and Dundee Universities and partners external to the Alliance.

 

Reviews

An international review of the Graduate School, has stated ‘Overall we believe that the SUPA Graduate School is moving in the right direction to provide a training which is competitive at the World level’. A review of SUPA for SFC by SQW Consulting stated that ‘the Graduate School is exceeding expectations’.