Approximately 15-20 years ago, NUPP leaders in academia hosted an annual Summer School for PhD students that rotated between hosts and venues across the country. The NUPP community came together at the 2024 AIP Congress and identified professional development of our HDR students as an immediate strategic priority. In 2026, the NUPP Executive Committee aims to reimagine this tradition with a Postgraduate Summer School designed to foster community, deepen knowledge, and equip students with the skills required to thrive in today’s diverse and evolving job markets.
The 2026 NUPP Summer School program will include:
- A residential experience designed to build connections between students from experiment and theory, different research areas of interest and home institutions from across the nation.
- Lectures and workshops from subject matter experts in nuclear and
particle physics. - Mentoring and guidance in careers with input from industry.
- An excursion to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology
Organisation site at Lucas Heights, NSW.
The summer school will consist of two days of introductory courses in
- Basics of QFT and the SM (Archil Kobakhidze)
- Introduction to colliders and detectors (Ulrik Egede)
- Introduction to theoretical nuclear physics (Cedric Simenel)
- Accelerator physics (Suzie Sheehy)
an excursion to ANSTO and two days of advanced courses on
- lattice QCD (Ross Young)
- dark matter direct detection (Ciaran O'Hare + Theresa Fruth)
- flavour physics (Ulrik Egede)
- neutrino physics (Innes Bigaran)
In addition to the lecture program, there will be social activities, student presentations and a careers night.
The summer school will be held in Old Main Building on the Kensington campus of UNSW in rooms G31 (lectures), 229 (workshops), G59/G60 (other activities).
We are grateful for sponsorship from
Platinum sponsors
Gold sponsors
Silver sponsors
