Under Alan Martin as Head of Department, Applied Physics is extracted from the Engineering Department and combined with the rest of Physics. The first year syllabuses were combined breathing new life into Applied Physics in Durham University.
Until now, the applied physics department had been separate from physics, but it was receiving fewer applicants every year. Initially they had joined engineering, but found this did not positively effect their student numbers. As staff members retired, they were being replaced with engineers rather than physicists. To aid the dwindling numbers, the applied department were extracted from engineering.
Brian Tanner explains how the new merger occurred.
The Physics Department made 564 offers to A-Level students in 1994, requiring grades of BCC in order to apply. Of the 594 applicants, 67 were interested in exclusively studying applied physics, between Bachelor's and integrated Master's degrees.
In this year, Arnold Wolfendale was knighted by the Queen, becoming the first non-Oxford, non-Cambridge academic to be appointed.
Physics and Astronomy was first offered as an undergraduate course, as was the integrated Masters course in Theoretical Physics. The department had installed a new computer classroom, with classes in the first year including an 'introduction to electronic mail, spreadsheets and basic-word processing'. Students had to write essays in their second and third year exams, and the Higher Education Funding Council, rated Durham University research as a 5 out of 5.
In 1999, Peter Ogden, alumni of Durham Physics, founded the Ogden Trust. By 2013, it had already given £14 million to upwards of 40 schools in the area surrounding Durham.
When the IPPP, the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, was first created, Universities across the country bid on the right to house the institute. Ogden contributed to Durham's bid, helping the University beat out Manchester and Oxford. The institute brought with it four new lectureships in the Physics Department.
View the slideshow of the Rochester Building from construction to completion, and the changes made through the decades
How Physics progressed here since the 2000s, with the creation of the Ogden Centres and new research institutes like the ICC, IPPP and Durham X-Ray Centre.
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