Scottish Graduate School in Physics
The SUPA Graduate School is staffed by a director, a secretary and three learning technologists 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. 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 seven video conferencing training suites and a purpose built Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) called My.SUPA.
The SUPA Graduate School has in the region of 450 PhD students in physics, recruiting around one hundred students per year across the six original SUPA alliance departments. Every year, the Graduate School runs a highly successful Prize Studentship Competition allocating fully funded prestigious Prize Studentships across the six 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:
|
Year |
2005 |
2006 |
2007 |
2008 |
2009 |
|
No. of applicants |
127 |
186 |
231 |
258 |
343 |
|
No. of countries |
34 |
50 |
44 |
55 |
59 |
|
No. of awards |
10 |
9 |
15 |
10 |
8 |
An international review of the SUPA Graduate School, conducted in March 2008, 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 I, conducted in May 2009, for the Scottish Funding Council by SQW Consulting (SUPA – Formative Evaluation of Research Pooling Part 1) states that ‘the Graduate School is exceeding expectations.'
The excellence in research demonstrated in condensed matter in the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt and in photonics in the universities of Heriot-Watt, St Andrews, Strathclyde and Glasgow coupled with the infrastructure of the SUPA Graduate School resulted in the award of two EPSRC Doctoral Training Centres – The Scottish Doctoral Centre in Condensed Matter Physics and the Engineering Doctorate in Photonics.
The Scottish Funding Council has extended the end of SUPA I from March 2010 to March 2011 and further committed £16M to the SUPA II project to continue and develop SUPA for a another four years. The SUPA Graduate School plays an important role in the SUPA II developments
SUPA Meeting and Distinguished Visitor Programme
The information about the SUPA Meeting and Distinguished Visitor Programme may be found at. http://www.supa.ac.uk/Graduate_School/Distinguished_Visitors.htm
