MSc Radiation and Environmental Protection

On this programme, you will gain:

Professional skills

• A systematic understanding of radiation and environmental protection in an academic and professional context, together with a critical awareness of current problems and/or new insights
• A comprehensive understanding of techniques applicable to your own research project in radiation and/or environmental protection
• Originality in the application of knowledge, together with a practical understanding of radiation-based, experimental research projects
• An ability to evaluate and objectively interpret experimental data pertaining to radiation detection
• Familiarity with generic issues in management and safety and their application to radiation and environmental protection in a professional context

Core academic skills

• The ability to plan and execute, under supervision, an experiment or investigation, and to analyse critically the results and draw valid conclusions from them
• The ability to evaluate the level of uncertainty in results, understand the significance of uncertainty analysis and be able to compare these results with expected outcomes, theoretical predictions and/or with published data – graduates should be able to evaluate the significance of their results in this context
• The ability to evaluate critically current research and advanced scholarship in the discipline of radiation protection• The ability to deal with complex issues both systematically and creatively, make sound judgements in the absence of complete data, and communicate your conclusions clearly to specialist and non-specialist audiences

Personal and key skills

• The ability to both communicate complex scientific ideas and the conclusions of an experiment, investigation or project concisely, accurately and informatively
• The ability to manage your own learning and to make use of appropriate texts, research articles and other primary sources
• Responsibility for personal and professional development, and the ability to use external mentors for personal/professional purposes

Research-led Teaching

The programme material is taught by a combination of academics from the Department of Physics at Surrey and specialists provided by industrial partners. The Surrey academics are part of the Centre for Nuclear and Radiation Physics which houses the largest academic nuclear physics research group in the UK.

In addition to the formal lectures for taught modules, the programme provides a wide range of experimental hands-on training. This includes a nine-week radiation physics laboratory which takes place in the specialist radiation laboratories within the Department of Physics at the University of Surrey. These were recently refurbished as part of a £1 million upgrade to the departmental teaching infrastructure. Within the Department, we also have a common room and a departmental library, which contains copies of earlier MSc dissertations.

As well as the laboratory training, you will also undertake a research project at the beginning of the Spring semester as a precursor to the eleven-week research dissertation project which makes up the final part of the MSc. There are many opportunities for both the spring research project and summer dissertation project to be taken in an external industrial environment.

The University of Surrey typically has a total of around 1,000 master’s students each year. These are from all over the world. Established in 1972, the Surrey MSc in Radiation and Environmental Protection is one of the UK’s longest running programmes in this field.

The programme has produced over 500 UK and overseas graduates, many of whom have gone on to well-paid positions in companies in the nuclear and radiation sectors. In the UK we need to decommission old reactors and build new ones to provide a low-carbon source of energy. This, together with, for example, the importance of radioisotopes in fields such as medicine, means that the career prospects of our graduates are excellent.

There are a number of prizes for the Radiation and Environmental Protection programme provided by leading industrial companies who both contribute to and sponsor the programme. These include AWE plc, GE Healthcare and Thermo Scientific. The programme has established a longstanding relationship with industrial end-users who have an extensive track record in employing graduates from the programme.

In addition to prizes and programme/student sponsorship, a number of senior industrial end-users make up the programme’s Industrial Advisory Committee which meets once a year to discuss the programme’s content and its relevance for graduates wishing to enter the radiation protection, nuclear power, health physics and instrumentation industries.