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).

Due to the current pandemic, the 2020 SUPA Annual Gathering scheduled for Wed 27th May has been replaced by online events of interest to the whole SUPA community under the title "Virtual Gathering". While reflecting as far as possible the tradition of sharing, inspiring and engaging our community by showcasing and celebrating internationally leading research, daily screen times have been minimized by stretching the single-day AG into a three-day VG.

Three lunchtime talks will be presented by research leaders from SUPA and beyond.

Tuesday 26/5/2020 - 1pm: Keynote Talk, "Attosecond Science"

Paul Corkum, U. Ottawa and National Research Council of Canada

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.

[Update Feb 2024] The Crucible Podcasts are available, where you can hear more about some of the projects which were supported by the European Crucible.  

The annual SUPA-Cormack meeting took place on the 9th of December 2019, at the RSE in Edinburgh. The meeting welcomed over 70 members of the SUPA Astronomy community, both student and staff, for a day of science and networking.

In a departure from previous years, the programme this year included two invited keynote talks. Dr Pamela Klaassen (UK Astronomy Technology Centre) gave an overview of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the role of Scotland in this mission, and Dr Sara Shinton (University of Edinburgh) led two sessions on Resilience and Wellbeing. Both talks served the desired purpose of promoting a sense of community. Dr Shinton’s talk led to extended discussions on the future role of the meeting, and of SUPA, in helping promote wellbeing within the Astronomy community in Scotland.

20 participants presented their posters in 1-minute flash talks, and seven participants gave longer twenty-minute talks. All SUPA Astronomy institutions were represented in the talks and posters: Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow, St Andrews and Strathclyde. 

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 joint 75th SUSSP and 20th STFC Summer School in Nuclear Physics and its Applications was held at St Andrews University, 5th-17th of August, organised by Daria Sokhan (Glasgow) and Alessandro Pastore (York). It followed the International Nuclear Physics Conference which ran in Glasgow and we are delighted to report that it was a great success, with the largest number of attendees to date: 59 students, out of which 46 were from the nine UK nuclear physics groups (33 of them STFC-funded) and 13 came from institutions outside of the UK: Armenia, Germany, India, Italy, Poland/Russia, Slovenia, South Africa and Switzerland.

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.

The SUPA Welcome Event 2019 - 17 October 2019

17 October 2019, Technology & Innovation Centre, University of Strathclyde.

The Welcome Event is a chance for new students to meet fellow new students, hear about what SUPA is and what we do for our students through the Graduate School, hear about the research highlights across our seven themes, hear from current PhD students, and discover the benefits and opportunities of public engagement.