Education

Applied Physics plays a crucial role in a wide range of technological developments throughout society, often related to high-tech solutions for worldwide challenges. There is a strong, continuous need for well-trained physicists who are able and eager to contribute to such developments. The Bachelor’s Program of Applied Physics prepares talented and motivated students for such a career. It not only gives our students a solid theoretical basis but also equips them with strong technical, experimental and scientific skills. Our graduates are well-prepared to enter various follow-up master’s programs and, in some cases, a subsequent PhD program, after which they are well-prepared for the contemporary job market. In many cases, they enter a variety of positions in high-tech industry and research institutes, but also in other fields in which analytical thinking using mathematics and physics modeling is a key element.

The Applied Physics major offers our students theoretical and applied physics and mathematics courses with increasing complexity through the years. This is supplemented and intertwined with a number of courses and projects to enhance technical, experimental, computational and transferable skills in which our students also profit from knowledge and skills developed in Basic courses and USE learning lines. Furthermore, the department also offers a wide range of elective courses and packages to further deepen or broaden applied physics knowledge. A Bachelor’s final project within one of the research groups of the department complements the Bachelor’s, offering students the opportunity to directly contribute to ongoing research within applied physics.

Our department provides a modern Master’s Program of Applied Physics, with a solid foundation in disciplinary physics knowledge combined with extensive hands-on components. Education and research are inextricably linked in our department and the extensive research track record of our staff (memberships of the KNAW and the Young Academy, Spinoza laureates, prize recipients of professional organizations like AVS and APS, editorships of most of the prominent journals in physics, etc.) sustains the quality of the physics foundation we can offer to our students.

In addition, the close relationship between our staff and the surrounding industrial ecosystem (ASML, Philips, VDL, Prodrive Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, TNO) – as demonstrated by numerous cross-appointments and by the fact that around 50% of our external income comes from collaboration with that ecosystem – provides us with adequate knowledge of the needs of the future employers of our students. The citation rates of our joint publications with the ecosystem are even higher than the excellent field-average citation rate of the staff within our department.

Last but not least, we also offer a curriculum that explicitly enables our teachers to educate the engineers of the future with the professional skills that are required by their future careers, whether these are in academia, industry or elsewhere in society.