The Cockcroft Institute hosted the 2021 National particle accelerator open day virtually on Wednesday, 3rd February 2021.The aim of the event was to ensure we get the opportunity to speak to undergraduate students about accelerators despite the lockdown. The open day had an exciting programme of events including talks and lab virtual tours plus the opportunity for students to talk to UK universities, laboratories and industry at virtual recruitment stands to find out how you can find studentship and employment opportunities in this exciting field. This year the tours were done in a virtual environment with two tours offered one of the Diamond light source, the UK’s flagship synchrotron light source, and one of the Elekta factory, a world-leading producer of radiotherapy machines. Talks on graduate opportunities were given by Laura Corner (Liverpool), Luke Dykes (Oxford), Hayley Cavanagh (ISIS), James Bourne (STFC) and Per Bergfjord (Elekta) providing a good mix of recent graduates, and employers from each sector.


We had 16 employers of PhD recruiters attend, made up of 8 Universities, 5 national labs, 1 hospital and two industry employers. We had around 170 undergraduate students register, over all 4 years of study, and about 78 turned up on the day. The talks and tours went very well with around 25 students for each of the four tour group. We had 78 students attend on the day, mostly from the UK (54) but also from the USA, Brazil,(4) India (3), Ireland (2), Greece, Bulgaria (2), Italy, Spain,  Netherlands, Poland, Korea, France, Canada, Germany, Portugal, UAE, Turkey. 

Prof Graeme Burt who chaired the event said “I’d like to thank all the many staff who gave up their time and effort to make this event a success, I’d particularly like to thank STFC media services who put together a fantastic platform in a very short period of time”. The Open Day was supported by the IoP Particle Accelerators and Beams (PAB) Group, STFC and the IET Particle Accelerator Engineering Network and had tours contributed from Diamond and Elekta.