A Taught Course Centre for the Mathematical Sciences based at Oxford, Warwick, Imperial, Bath and Bristol.

This Centre is a collaboration between Bath, Bristol, Imperial, Oxford and Warwick to provide a broad training to PhD students in mathematics. The five participating universities pool their resources to offer 25 lecture courses per year for doctoral students, broadcast via Access Grid so that lectures held in any one university are viewed in real time by audiences in the other four. This mode of delivery is fully interactive; lecturers and students in each of the venues can see and hear each other during the lectures. Students at other universities can also participate in these lectures via Access Grid. Interactions between students in the different universities are fostered by miniconferences supported by the Centre at which students give seminar talks. Lecture materials are archived and accessible via the Centre website, which is also accessible to students at other universities. The Access Grid technology of the Centre is also used for seminars, study groups and research networks.

The beneficiaries of the project will be graduate students in mathematics at UK universities as well as other researchers at these institutions. Graduate students will benefit by receiving training through a much broader range of graduate lecture courses than would otherwise have been available to them. They will also benefit through the provision of event days funded and organised by the Centre, at which students will have the opportunity to interact with their counterparts at other universities. More senior researchers will benefit from the use of the Access Grid environment to conduct seminars and study groups involving audiences in geographically separated locations.