This is the transcript for the video Biomedical Physics – Course Info
Thanks for tuning in. Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands. I pay respect to elders both past and present, acknowledging them as traditional custodians of knowledge for this land. My name is Dr. Annette Dowd, I’m the course director for the biomedical physics degrees. I’ll be running through some information about this cause for you today. In this session, I’ll introduce biomedical physics to you, I will explain why UTS is the place to study it, and I’ll give you an idea about what you do in the course and what you can do afterwards. The reason UTS is an excellent place to study science and maths is because we are focused on real world experience and real world science, you’ll be doing hands on projects and internships. All of us are science and maths leaders. All of us, teachers, lecturers, professors are science and math leaders in our fields, we are all practicing scientists. And we have also the very best specialised laboratories and facilities. We have a lot of industry and public sector connections and our research makes real impact. So in biomedical physics, we’re concerned with how physics can make an impact in the clinical and biological sciences. You can use biomedical physics degrees as a stepping stone to work in areas that involve both physics and biomedical science, such as the medical device industry.
It also prepares you for further graduate studies in areas such as medical physics, biophysics and biomedical engineering. I illustrate here what I mean by a stepping stone. With a Bachelor of Biomedical Physics, you can then step into a Masters of Medical Physics or Imaging Technology, and from there you can graduate as an accredited medical physicist or imaging technologist. You can also use it as a stepping stone into a Bachelor of Surgery if you wish to move into the direction of becoming a clinical specialist or a doctor. There are also other more research and development oriented career pathways you can take over studies in Honours and PhD and then go into research in biomedical physics. In biomedical physics, degrees also allow you to move into the direction of working in the growing medical device industry and in being a technologist for instrument stage, instrumentation or for sales. In the degree, we will help you to study physics, maths and human biology, forming a very strong foundation. Gradually, as you move into your senior years, you’ll take more interdisciplinary subjects. There’s also a semester where you can take elective subjects in order to tailor the degree to your interests. In this photograph here, I show you a laboratory where I got some of my students to electrocute themselves – very gently. But it was an example for them to see and to practice how physics can make a difference to our understanding of biology.
At UTS, we will have lots of on campus lectures and laboratories in our specially designed laboratories, we also have a lot of independent online learning, so we encourage you to be able to teach yourself. The photograph here shows the students working in the senior optics laboratory. And the colourful pictures show some of the phenomena that they were studying. From first year, we are now introducing mentoring for our students to help them think through various career pathways and to help them choose the subjects that will help them get to the career that they’d like. In your final year of your degree, you’ll take a capstone project. I’ve listed here some of the wide range subjects that our students are taking in their projects just this year alone. You can see that is everything that from very fundamental studies of biological systems through to looking at radiation protection. Here, we’re going to look at the course study plan in more detail. In a multidisciplinary degree, it’s really important that we start off with a very strong foundation in core studies. So in our first year, we take a lot of fundamental physics. In second year, we expand that, we take a lot more physics because we will be seeing how these can be applied, in our third year, to different areas.
Maths is another really important thing for us to study. It’s the primary language that physics uses in order to explain and to predict different phenomena. In second year, we also need to increase our fundamental mathematical knowledge and will be used in all of our future studies. Chemistry becomes quite important because we’ll be using physics to understand what happens in the human body, which is where a lot of chemistry goes on, that chemistry will be used in future when looking at different types of technology and interfacing between physical instrumentation and the human body. Another important thing for you to study is, of course, human biology. We start off with a foundation in anatomy and physiology. Then we take genetics and cell biology to look at what happens on a microscopic scale and that understanding is then used in future projects where we combine physics and biology. Of course, we also get to take four electives, which you can use to choose whatever area of science you’re interested in. Thanks for watching. I hope this information video was insightful for you. If you’ve got any questions at all, feel free to get in touch and you can contact us via email at science@uts.edu.au. And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Thank you. Bye.