My Teaching and Administrative
Responsibilities
I am currently the Director of Progammes for
Physics & Astronomy, which means I am responsible for the delivery
of our undergraduate teaching programmes. As part of this role, I also
chair the Physics & Astronomy section of the Faculty Programme
Committee, and I am also the appeals officer for Physics &
Astronomy.
If you are a student with an academic
question or concern, you can certainly always contact me. However, your
first port of call should usually be your academic tutor. The faculty
office can also often help -- they are located in the Zepler building,
and you can reach them by email at either fpas-assess@soton.ac.uk (for
assessment related matters) or fpas-student@soton.ac.uk (for all other
matters). If you think you might want to appeal an academic
decision, or that you need to make a complaint, please contact Ben
Connell, our Senior Curriculum & Quality Assurance Officer.
Finally, our faculty also has an excellent Senior Tutor, Eric Cooke,
who is always happy to talk to students. Eric is also located in the
Zepler building.
In addition to being Director of Programmes,
I also still run PHYS2011 "Design and Observation in Astronomy". This
second year module is our annual 2-week astronomy field trip to
Tenerife, which runs over the Easter break. The course is open to the
top 12 students on our MPhys/BSc with Astronomy programmes. The first
week is an intense space mission design study that takes place at the
University of La Laguna and is carried out in teams of students from a
variety of international and academic backgrounds. More specifically,
teams are composed of UK, Spanish and Irish students on astronomy,
space science and engineering programmes. This week is led by my
Southampton colleague Tony Bird. The second week, which I lead myself,
takes the astronomers to the Observatorio del Teide, a professional
research observatory, where they get to use a variety of telescopes to
carry out astronomical observations. Students are allowed, and actually
encouraged, to choose and design their own observing programmes, and
then have to analyse, write up and present the data they have obtained
after returning to Southampton. Both weeks of the course are intended
to take students through a compressed version of the full life-cycle of
space mission design and observational astronomy, with the students
themselves taking full ownership of the projects they carry out in both
weeks.
Previously, I also taught PHYS1008 "Physics
of the Solar System" and PHYS2015 "Introduction to Energy and the
Environment".
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