Project Title
Title:
Dr Costas Constantinou
Duration:
3.27 mins
My name is Costas Constantinou, I am a reader in Communications
Engineering in the School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering at
Birmingham University. My area of specialisation within communications
engineering is radio systems, antennas, radio wave propagation.
The programme that I talk to you about is a brand new one, it’s called Physics
for Radio Engineering and it’s the UK’s first dedicated Master’s programme,
taught Master’s programme that is designed from the ground up to take
Physics graduates and essentially retrain them as radio engineers.
The programme is aimed at Physics graduates who’s knowledge of
electromagnetic theory and mathematics is fairly extensive and who have an
interest in working either on engineering projects applying their knowledge or
physics projects which have a significant engineering component to them
essentially where they can design their own radiofrequency electronics as part
of a physics programme.
The programme content is conceptually divided into four parts. The first part is
conversion modules, the second part is the core modules, the third part is
optional modules and the fourth part is an extensive individual research
project. The first part is essentially an introduction to electronics, an
introduction to communication systems and an introduction to signal
processing and scientific computing. The second part has introduction, has
core modules in radiofrequency engineering, both for passive circuits and
active circuits.
Graduates of this programme can pursue a career in industry where there is
considerable demand for graduates with these skills or they could turn back to
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Project Title
physics and work on the engineering aspects of physics programmes. For
example when you are building a big radio telescope and awful lot of the
activity on antennas and low noise amplifiers is really radio frequency
engineering. So, a graduate of this programme could choose to do both the
science and the engineering or major or neither.
Good reasons for choosing this course is that it’s the only course of its kind
aimed squarely at physics graduates and Birmingham is one of the four
centres of excellence in RF and microwave communications in the United
Kingdom, it’s got a huge international track record and we have been involved
some of the seminal developments of radiofrequency technology in the
modern world for example we helped pioneer the first, one of the first
automotive radar systems in the world together with Jaguar Land Rover and
we were also the research group that built the first multiband integrated
antenna on a modern mobile telephone that you can actually find in all the
modern mobile telephones in the world.
END OF RECORDING
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