The Institute of Physics' latest Academic Appointments Survey provides a snapshot of the people, from researchers to experimental officers,lecturers and professors, in the UK's physics departments as of December 2008, to enable comparison with the previous survey complete in 2004.

 The survey aims to determine the current state of the physics community by breaking it down in terms of gender, grade and research activity, while also assessing movements into and out of the community over the last five years.

 With far more than a third of the UK's 1,850 or so academic physicists(38%) across 47 university departments working in either astronomy, astrophysics, smology and space physics or high energy and particle physics, these research areas remain the most highly-populated.

 Over the survey period there has been an encouraging increase in the proportion of female physicists at all levels in the UK.  There was also a rise in the number of physicists working on surface, interfaces and materials, a reflection of the increasing importance of nanotechnology.

 As a percentage of the total staff headcount within biophysics and biological physics, this research area has seen the largest increase with a net gain of 15 staff members (30% of the current biophysics and biological physics community).

 The academic community as a whole has seen significant growth over the five-year survey period, with a net gain of 231 members of staff, representing some 12% of the current total staff complement, with almost half of these new recruits going into the most highly-populated areas of physics - astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and space physics or high energy and particle physics.

 Perhaps the most encouraging signs from the report are the increases in female physicists.  The proportion of female physics lecturers has risen from 10 to 21% over the survey period.

 Professor Peter Main, director of science and education at the Institute of Physics, said, "We are delighted to see the continuing health of physics research and, particularly, the growth in number of female physicists.  Together with the recent upturns in university admissions and A-level entries in physics, these represent good news for the subject and good news for the economy."

 Read the full report at:

 http://www.iop.org/activity/policy/Publications/file_38783.pdf