Professor Peter McDonald

Peter McDonald has long had special interest in teaching practical physics: indeed details of some experiments that he has developed have been published by the Institute of Physics in their journal “Physics Education”. His largest contributions have been to undergraduate laboratory classes at HFEQ Level 4 (i.e. BSc / Mphys year 1) as part of the “Oscillations and Waves” and “Scientific Investigation Skills” modules. He also enjoys supervising final year projects that genuinely have opportunity to create new knowledge. In summer 2015, he supervised two projects: the student taking one received the departmental undergraduate project prize and both led to papers published in peer reviewed journals with the student as co-author.

His research interest in magnetic resonance translates to teaching of the core of electromagnetism in the HFEQ Level 5 module “Electromagnetic Waves”. Electromagnetism was one of the great achievements of classical physics that today underpins very many technologies impacting everyday life. He uses a number of teaching approaches to get across both the simplicity and beauty of some of the ideas as well as the complexity of the descriptive mathematics.

That same research is also relevant to his teaching of magnetic resonance (MRI - as used in clinical imaging) at M-Level. Again concept and application is as important as the mathematics. Many students will have experienced his way of getting across concepts of pulse sequence in MRI: students stand in class and rotate their arms and legs to emulate the behaviour of magnetic field and magnetisation vectors.

In previous years, he has taught the lecture material of “Oscillations and Waves” where he introduced a series of lecture demonstrations; “Mathematical Methods” and “Introductory Electronics” that is now incorporated into other modules.

He is Module Leader for PHYM044 Non-Ionising Radiation Imaging and for PHY3047 Physics in Education