The SERPENTINE team organized a 5 credit-point graduate level course in the University of Turku (UTU) in May–June 2022. The course gave an introduction to Solar Energetic Particle Events with lectures covering topics from the theory of particle acceleration to the data analysis techniques for solar energetic particle (SEP) and supporting solar and solar-wind observations.
The contact teaching was organized in a three-week intensive period (three days a week, four hours per day). Each teaching day consisted of a lecture and hands-on exercises with Python based tools that the teachers had developed for the course. Following the intensive period, students carried on with group work assignments during which they put their acquired skills to practice by analyzing one SEP event in detail from many aspects of the problem over three weeks. Each group presented their work in a mid-June seminar. Students could also opt out from the group work and were awarded 2 credit points for the three-week intensive course. The course was conducted fully in hybrid mode and altogether 26 students from all over the world participated in it.
In addition to researchers from UTU, the teachers included researchers from all partner institutes of the SERPENTINE project, providing students with top-level expertise on SEP events and related phenomena.
“This turned out to be a very successful course on SEPs at graduate level,” tells Nina Dresing, who coordinated the course. “The students participated very actively and got hands-on experience on a number of important data analysis aspects related to SEP events. We could not have given such a course without the broad expertise of the SERPENTINE network.”
“I really enjoyed the course and learned a lot,” says Antonio Esteban Niemela who is a PhD student in KU Leuven, Belgium. “The hands-on experience was good, and the tools that were presented are very useful.”
The lecture material and the hands-on exercises will be distributed publicly for re-use after the summer break. This includes also the Python-based analysis tools of the course. Stay tuned!