Faculty of Science

Our facilities

Our facilities

The Faculty of Science, housed in different buildings at the Msida Campus, has a number of facilities for students, researchers and academics.

The Department of Biology has a number of facilities that are used for teaching and research. These include teaching and research laboratories, a museum, an aquarium room and a SCUBA dive centre that is licenced to teach and certify internationally-recognised PADI diving courses.  

Investment continues to be made in the Department of Chemistry extending our range of facilities. The well-equipped research laboratories are augmented by excellent computational facilities and some of the most modern instrumentation available. In addition to the basic spectromters for teaching such as and  FT-IR a UV-Vis and Fluorescence spectroscopy,the Department of Chemistry has an instrument pool containing a range of major items of equipment possessed by the School include  a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer, a UPLCMSMS, an XRF, an ICP-OES, two powder X-ray diffractometers as well as a single crystal X-ray diffractometer, a Thermal analyser and a BET besides many otehr instruments related to solid state analysis.

The Department of Geosciences has a wide range of instrumentation and computational facilities for use in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes as well as for research and service provision. These include geophysical investigation equipment and software, UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and ROV’s (Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles), atmospheric and air quality laboratories, processing and modelling suites for seafloor exploration and field surveying, expertise in geological laboratory analysis, computational facilities for environmental physics, fluid dynamics and dispersion modelling, equipment and computational modelling for oceanographic monitoring and measurements.

Students taking Mathematics are given the opportunity to learn and use the powerful software package Wolfram Mathematica, which can be used to support mathematical learning, experimentation, research and computation. This software is available for use by students in the Faculty of Science computer labs.

In the optics laboratory we conduct experiments mainly related to metrology. In 2017 we used an ultrastable laser based in this laboratory to send a frequency reference to Sicily, using which we detected small earthquakes in the central Mediterranean region [Science 361, 486 (2018)]. 

Electromagnetics Research Laboratory conduct research across a broad range of topics including antenna and sensor design, dielectric spectroscopy and EMF exposure studies.  

The Ultra Wide-Band Laboratory (UWBL) hosts a multidisciplinary team of research scientists from the Institute of Space Science and Astronomy (ISSA). At the Institute, the team is working on a broad range of research areas including radio astronomy, high-performance software for large radio instruments, antenna design, cosmology and alternative theories of gravity.

Computers are essential tools for solving numerical problems. During their course, students reading for a degree in Statistics & Operations Research are exposed to a variety of software packages including R, SPSS, Matlab, Mathematica and Python. The Department makes use of Labs 602, 605 and 606 which are located in floor 6 of the Maths & Physics Building.


https://www.um.edu.mt/science/ourfacilities/