Subject-specific Postgraduate Training Seminars are organised on a Faculty-wide basis, with each Department in the Science Faculty contributing sessions based on their own specialities and requirements. All sessions are open to all postgraduate students (full-time and part-time) from across the Faculty. The Training Seminars specifically provided by members of the Physics and Astronomy Department include sessions on computer techniques (Unix, IDL, MATLAB, parallel programming, numerical techniques, etc.) as well as information retrieval and network services. We also present approximately bi-annual series of postgraduate lectures on: stellar atmospheres and advanced stellar spectroscopy, binary stars, magnetic accretion, nuclear astrophysics, radiation mechanisms in astrophysics, exoplanets, astrobiology, neutron star astrophysics, and statistics and numerical methods in astrophysics. Typically there will be 40 - 50 hours of lectures provided in an academic year, which will be attended by the first and second year students. Third year students attend lectures only if it is a topic not offered previously, and which interests them. In addition to these postgraduate lectures, students have access to copies of any OU teaching materials, and can use these to remedy gaps in undergraduate preparatation, or to underpin interdisiplinary research, e.g. in astrobiology.
