It's been a year of ups and down, home working for some, back in the lab, classroom and office for others, and we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect back on all the successes of the last year. 

See our summary infographic below, but for those who prefer the written word, here is a summary of the successes acros SUPA in 2021:

The SUPA Public Engagement Forum aims to bring together those with a passion and interest for public engagement across SUPA and beyond. Exploring current activities and illustrating what can be achieved together with external partners with whom we work to promote public understanding of science.

The event will open with a Welcome from Prof Julie Fitzpatrick, Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland.

We will hear from key science centres about what platforms and audiences they can provide for researchers, and learn from the experiences of those SUPA researchers and projects that have engaged with science centres. Speakers include:

Professor Catherine Heymans, a world-leading expert on the physics of the so-called dark universe, has been awarded the prestigious title of Astronomer Royal for Scotland, a title which dates back almost 200 years. Created in 1834, the position of Astronomer Royal for Scotland was originally held by the director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Since 1995, however, it has been awarded as an honorary title. The previous holder, Professor John C Brown, passed away in 2019.

Prof Heymans was recommended to the Queen for the role by an international panel, convened by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is Professor of Astrophysics in the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at Ruhr-University Bochum. Her research seeks to shed light on the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter – elusive entities that together account for more than 95 per cent of the Universe.

Once that spark and connection with the Universe is made,

February 2021 became Finding Your Future month at SUPA, offering PhD students and Early Career Researchers the opportunity to explore a variety of professions and discuss these with representatives from industry and academia. 

The 2021 event "Finding Your Future" opened with CV clinics for SUPA students and researchers during the first two weeks of February with support from careers advisers and experts from our universities and the Institute of Physics.

The final two weeks of February had daily discussions with guest speakers about their careers post-PhD, with each day concentrating on a particular theme. Themes included were: Research & Innovation, Research, Physics & Life Sciences, Business Development & Intellectual Property, Science Communication, Third Sector & Public Sector, Education & teaching, Computation & Coding. We opened up these daily discussions to the wider Scottish research and innovation community, inviting students from other research pools, through Research Innovation Scotland.

As we start the 2020/21 academic year under challenging circumstances, SUPA finds itself well placed for online learning, with our experience and knowledge of video classrooms already well developed. Having moved our Annual Gathering online back in May, we now find ourselves supporting lecturers providing our courses on different platforms, in different modes to previously. Many of our courses will continue to run as in previous years, with live lectures broadcast through our video conferencing tool, VScene. Others will be switching to using pre-recorded materials. 

At SUPA Central, we are busy preparing to Welcome the new intake of PhD students in October, with an online Welcome Event on the morning of Tues 20 October. Details will be circulated to the students in due course. 

We have introduced new videos introducing how to get the best from the SUPA student experience. 

Watch this short video on accessing our Virtual Learning Environment, My.SUPA (1min 48s, can watch with or without sound). 

Watch this short video to find out about the courses we offer, and what we require of our students (2min 26s, can watch with or without sound).

We invite all members of SUPA – student, professor and everyone in between – to showcase a highlight from the last year for the SUPA community online. Your highlight could be about your research project, a scientific or technical breakthrough, a report on a recent paper you’ve published, a collaborative initiative between SUPA or other partners, a creative interdisciplinary project, an industry placement, an outreach or public engagement activity, or a research visit.

We will bring together these highlights of the last year in an online showcase format, to share, inspire and engage our community in the absence of being able to network and exchange information at the cancelled 2020 SUPA Annual Gathering, 27th May 2020.

More information is available on the Event webpage.

Calling early/mid-career research leaders from life, physical, engineering, computational, mathematical, environmental and social sciences, arts and humanities in Scotland and Europe!

Scottish Research Pools, the University of Luxembourg and other partner institutions have joined together to form European Crucible, an international research collaboration event gathering together Scottish future research leaders with their counterparts from across Europe.

Recognising the importance of international research collaboration, and following the success of Scottish Crucible over the past decade, this European Crucible will stimulate new international research collaborations between Scottish and European researchers. The meeting will create a new network for research leaders between Scotland and Europe, and enable international collaboration on interdisciplinary research and innovation topics with additional engagement with policy-makers and industry. This first European Crucible event will have an emphasis on innovative collaborations at the interfaces between Life Sciences and other disciplines.

In October we welcomed nearly 90 of our latest cohort of PhD students from across our member institutions. Meeting at the Technology & Innovation Centre at the University of Strathclyde, the day introduced the group to the SUPA research themes and the fantastic research within them, had a research highlight talk from Daniele Faccio (Glasgow) on his ground-breaking research into quantum and computational imaging, heard from final year student Araceli Venegas-Gomez (Strathclyde) on her career journey and how to get the most from your PhD, and a talk from Stuart Reid (Strathclyde) on the benefits of public engagement. There was also a quiz (some trivia, some important information about SUPA processes!), and a 'mystery box' activity where the students learnt about undertaking collaborative research, communication and got to know one another.

The 27th International Nuclear Physics Conference (INPC 2019) was held in Glasgow this summer (29 July to 2 August). Held every three years,
INPC is the biggest conference in the world for fundamental nuclear physics, and is overseen by the International Union of Pure and Applied
Physics (IUPAP). This was the first time it had been held in Scotland, with previous conferences having been in locations such as Adelaide, Florence and Vancouver.

Over 650 delegates from 32 countries were welcomed by Baillie John Kane, representing Glasgow's Lord Provost, and to Scotland by Ivan McKee MSP, representing the Scottish government. The programme covered the very latest work across the whole range of topic areas in Nuclear Physics, from the study of hadrons to the heaviest nuclei, and the role of nuclear physics in our understanding of the universe. The importance of applications of nuclear science was also highlighted. In addition to the SUPA-sponsored public lecture, an outreach programme was put together by teams from Glasgow and York, featuring amongst other things a chart of nuclides built from lego.