Departmental news

On Thursday 9 February, Professor Stuart Croft (Vice-Chancellor) visited the department to present a Warwick wow award to Ally Caldecote (Outreach Officer) and Tishtrya Mehta (post-doctoral researcher) for their continuous hard work and dedication to the annual Christmas Lectures. The Christmas Lectures take place in early December at Warwick Arts Centre, and have been running for 12 years. To date, over 17,000 people have attended.

We spoke to Ally, founder of the Christmas Lectures who said:

"It is an honour to see the appreciation for the Christmas Lectures! They are a labour of love each year with lots of different people coming together to showcase fantastic science and scientists. As a physics department we are deeply committed to sharing what we do with as many as possible and if we can do it wearing Christmas jumpers and Santa hats then that's just a bonus!"

Alongside Ally, Tishtrya plays a pivotal part in the Christmas lectures each year. She said:

"Being a part of the Christmas Lectures Team has been such a highlight of my time at Warwick - I've loved watching the most incredible shows put together by passionate and talented scientists and technicians and learning about the most bizarre and wonderful research, such as the secret life of Brussels sprouts!

It's a joy to see the lectures being awarded and to hear the well earned praise for Ally Caldecote and Paul Warwick (China Plate Theatre) who have been indispensable in making the lectures so full of life and loved by so many."

The wow award celebrates amazing work, projects, and achievements at the University.

Find out more about the university award and watch the video.Link opens in a new window

Launched in 2015, the XMaS Scientist Experience is a nationwide opportunity for any Year 12 UK Physics students who identify as female to join us on an all-expenses-paid 4-day trip to the ESRF in Grenoble, France at the beginning of July 2023. Our aim is to encourage students to consider science careers, foster a sense of community and encourage self-belief.

Find out more about the experience.

Watch the video that was made by the ESRF team in July 2017.

We have a small number of work experience placements available each year for students in Years 10-12. Our 2023 work experience will take place on Monday 3rd April to Thursday 6th April inclusive.

The work experience placement will provide you with a broad insight into physics and what it would be like to work in a busy university physics department. You will spend time with our highly skilled research and technical staff learning about real-life physics problems and working on exciting research projects.

Find out more and how to apply.Link opens in a new window

Huge congratulations to Robb Johnston, Technical Services Manager who has been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) in the 2023 New Year Honours List. The British Empire Medal is awarded for meritorious and 'hands-on' service to the local community. Robb has been awarded a BEM for his contribution to Physics. Robb commented on the news of his award "I was very surprised and honoured to receive it."

Robb has worked in the department for 39 years in February and oversees the management of technical support staff and the building's critical services, infrastructure, and maintenance.

The Global Network On Sustainability In Space (GNOSIS) is a network funded by UKRI’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, aiming to promote, coordinate, and develop collaboration across the academic, defence, industrial, and political sectors to understand and solve problems relating to the sustainable use of space.

From November 30 – December 1, the Centre for Space Domain AwarenessLink opens in a new window hosted the GNOSIS Annual Conference 2022, “Space Sustainability for the Next Decade (and Beyond)”, co-sponsored by CGI and Astroscale.

Read more about the conference, hear from the organising committee as well as sponsors and attendees.

Dr Rebecca Nealon and Dr Farzana Meru from our Astronomy and Astrophysics group have been working with our outreach officer, Ally Caldecote to develop a new coding program for students aged 7-11. The aim of the program is to improve coding literacy and to inspire children to consider coding (and more broadly STEM) in their future, as well as empower teachers and parents to support children in their coding journey.

As a Stephen Hawking Fellowship holder, Rebecca has an outreach component which started the development of the new program. The program which is being run as a pilot with a local school involves 6 lessons, each of which contains a bit of Physics, some 'unplugged' coding exercises and self-led coding exercises. Named 'Coding with Sophie', the children use coding to help Sophie the Astronaut solve a bunch of problems to collect her rocket parts, build and launch the rocket, avoid asteroids, find the aliens, draw smoke patterns and fall into the black hole.

The team are aiming to offer this programme within more local primary schools, and eventually to send out the resources for teachers to run in the classes themselves. Rebecca tells us, "A major part of this program is to encourage more children to pursue coding and to engage them with physics problems. In our pilot study we have found that students enjoy this balance and really like applying the physics they have learnt in a coding framework."

The six week pilot program has just finished with capacity for school visits building from March 2023.

For more information, please contact Dr Rebecca NealonLink opens in a new window or Dr Farzana MeruLink opens in a new window.

In2science is a summer programme for year 12 students to gain insight into STEM careers and research. There is a wider participation element, as students are selected based on criteria indicating a disadvantaged background, and are all from non-fee paying and non-selective state-maintained schools. After applying to the scheme in April, Dr Wing Ying Chow found out in June that she had been matched, and hosted four students for a week in August. The students came from schools in north Coventry and the outskirts of Birmingham. They have all faced various levels of disruption due to COVID and this is their first work experience.

Solid-state NMR was a completely new technique to all of the students. That didn’t stop them from getting some hands-on experience: they packed a rotor and ran some experiments on the national high-field GHz spectrometer. During the placement, the students started to make connections between the A-levels they are studying, whether maths, chemistry, biology, or physics, with what is going on in the lab and in the magnet.

Ying received plenty of help and support in hosting, especially for tours and lab visits. As a new Assistant Professor without a group of her own, she found it was a great way to get to know more of the department and the university, “It was not only gratifying to see the students becoming more confident and outspoken over the week, but I also learned a lot from finding new ways to explain scientific concepts at Y12 level.”

Read Ying’s blog about the programme.

Find out how to host a summer 2023 placement. 

After a successful week at the National Astronomy Meeting hosting over 800 astronomers and more than a thousand members of the public, we speak to some of our Local Organising Committee (LOC) who reflect on the past week.

Hear from Dr David Brown, Chair of LOCLink opens in a new window

Hear from Catriona McDonald, PhD studentLink opens in a new window

Hear from Tom Killestein, PhD studentLink opens in a new window

The 2022 Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) will be hosted by the University of Warwick's Physics Department from Monday 11th July to Friday 15th July. Alongside the incredible science programme planned for attendees, the team have also organised an extensive public engagement programme on campus which is mostly free and completely open to the public.

Find out more about NAM and the events on offer.

In outreach & engagement news, a team of Physics staff led by Oksana Trushkevych (including Gavin Bell, Rachel Edwards, Tim Cunningham and Sue Burrows) presented “Resonate: a string, a concert hall, a universe” for the on-campus Resonate festival, the culmination of the University's celebrations for Coventry City of Culture.

The word resonate was on everyone’s lips, but people did not really talk about resonance in the physics sense of the word (there are some pretty iffy technical definitions even in the most reputable online dictionaries!). So the team set out to correct this and prepared an interactive lecture-performance, drawing on their current research as well as their teaching on The Science of Music module for IATL. PhD students from the Ultrasound group helped to move equipment and instruments, such as theremin and laser harp, to the Arts Centre’s Studio Theatre, and Gentian Mouron-Adams (a Physics undergraduate) demonstrated the Rubens tube. We talked about bridges, earthquakes, musical instruments, concert halls, MRI, seeing resonance, seeing with resonance, using resonance to hear... Activities included “singing” with balloons, “feeling” a piece of original music by Gavin through balloons and a “decipher the message” challenge relying on the natural reverberation of our teaching labs. We celebrated Delia Derbyshire, the electronic music pioneer from Coventry, who created the original Dr Who theme. We also talked about stars singing (actual stars, not celebs, and why we can’t hear them) and the universe being a set of resonances (well, if you are a string theorist). The event was aimed at children 8+ and received very positive feedback from attendees, young and grown up, who all made a lot of noise during and after the show.