Course summary

On this course, you’ll learn about the physics that keeps us alive – the fluid mechanics behind blood flow, the forces acting on bones and tissues – and the technologies managed by medical physicists in the NHS. In your final year, you’ll complete a work placement to help you prepare for a career as a medical physicist or in research. This might be at a local hospital, working with teams that use techniques such as MRI to diagnose illnesses, or in industry, at a company that’s developing new technologies to identify and treat disease. At the start of your course, you’ll cover the essential physics behind everything else you’ll study: heat, motion, electricity, magnetism and quantum mechanics. You will also start to study the human body as a physical machine, and how electronics can be used to model biological systems. Lectures and lab classes are included in the same modules, so you won’t be learning about abstract topics in isolation. You’ll run experiments using the equipment in our modern laboratories to help you understand how important theories apply to the real world. You’ll explore essential physics in even more depth in your second year. You’ll also continue to specialise in medical physics, with modules on the tissues of the human body, medical imaging and biomedical instrumentation. In programming classes you can learn skills that are key to medical physics and valuable in many graduate careers, from data science to computer game design. In your third year, you can branch out into lots of different areas and complete your own research project in medical physics. In your core modules, you’ll learn how computational techniques are used to examine medical problems and simulate natural systems, as well as studying topics like particle physics and nuclear physics. Optional modules include quantum mechanics and dark matter. In your final year, you’ll complete a medical physics placement at a local hospital or in industry. There are also a variety of optional modules to choose from, and you’ll pick a topic for your own research project in medical physics, and work closely with a member of academic staff who is an expert in the area you want to explore. Accredited by the Institute of Physics (IOP) for the purpose of fully meeting the educational requirement for Chartered Physicist.