2009 International Review of UK Chemistry Research

Town Meeting - 12 June 2009: Transcript

David Delpy

I’m David Delpy, I’m CEO of EPSRC and I would like to welcome you formally to this town meeting which is representing the International Review of Chemistry Report.

I am going to very quickly go through a brief introduction and scene setting. The programme for today is shown here, the context that I’ll be talking about is a brief description for those of you who haven’t already seen it, of EPSRC’s budget, its priorities and so on and why we undertake these international reviews, and I’ll then hand over to Jim Feast who chaired our Steering Committee very, very ably in planning this whole thing, and then of course the real meat of the meeting, is Mike Klein who chaired the panel and who will present the main findings and recommendations. At the end Andrew Bourne will do a summing up as I have to be at another EPSRC meeting, and then a buffet lunch where you can ask the questions you weren’t brave enough to ask in the public session.

Let me just quickly do a scene setting about EPSRC. Let me start with the budget. Because that essentially defines what we can do this is our budget over the period 2004/05 through to the end of the current spending round 2010/11.

Over the last 10 -11 years the overall science & engineering budget has doubled in real terms, but over the more recent period the large part of that growth has been in meeting the full economic costs of the research we were funding. When Council was planning this current spending round and what we were going to spend the money on, we asked our Council, TOP and UP committees and SATs and the community, what we should focus on if we have a flat budget, up 5% or down 5%. The key messages that came out, the key priorities were that we should put more of our funding for centres for doctoral training and you know we have done this. Our priority themes, the ones that had been identified by the community, we ought to fund those at a level that we had anticipated doing so if our budget went up 5%. So even if the budget went down by -5%, the message that we got from the community, and from Council, was that if these are your themes and priorities then you should fund them at an appropriate level and that’s what we did. But the core of our funding, the responsive mode or central platform is still the largest single item by some considerable way as you will see and we committed over the 3 years of our spending round period £866m into that area.

So, the goals that we set ourselves over this current 3 year period were an increased focus on the key challenges on society and these are largely those cross-Council programmes that I'm sure you are aware of – Energy, Environment, Healthcare, Nanotechnology, Digital Economy and in Security. We specifically set out to try to encourage more ambitious (and that often is therefore slightly larger and longer) research programmes; but also more transformative research and as part of that have really tried to get adventurous research funded, we have undertaken, and still are undertaking, a review of peer review and the peer review mechanisms that

1 enable exciting and high risk research to get funded and through the peer review mechanism.

Supporting our brightest young researchers, and Mike and his team have picked up quite a lot about early career researchers, and I’m sure he’ll have a lot to say about it. We focussed our fellowship scheme as you know on 2 fellowship schemes now, a career acceleration scheme for earlier stage researchers and a leadership fellowship for those who are slightly more established so we reduced our overall fellowship funding, really focussing on that early stage career.

Given that the government had doubled the science budget over the last 10 years, the pressure from Treasury to show the value, and the impact that research was having, was certainly increasing at the start of our spending round period and given the changes in the economic climate, those pressures have increased even further. And so we have put a lot of effort into working with our partners, with the end users of the research that takes place to ensure how we make sure that those areas which really can be quickly translated into having an impact (that’s an economic impact in terms of manufacturing, whether its an impact on government policy making), but trying to put through as quickly as possible the outcomes of the research, and being able to demonstrate to Treasury where that extra funding that they have provided was going.

And we did an internal reorganisation but I think that is less relevant at the moment.

So, our total budget now, those 3 bars you saw on the graph, 2 slides ago, totals £2.4 billion over a 3 year period and that £2.4 billion is essentially focussed into these major cross council themes, those themes which we believe are of major societal, both national and international societal importance and the 3 cross council programmes that we manage are the Digital Economy, Energy, and the Nano Science one we have our own focus programme on Next Generation Healthcare. Three other cross council programmes are managed by the NERC on environmental change. Global security is managed by ESRC and Ageing is managed by MRC, but we contribute to them. But the largest proportion of our funding out of the £2.4 billion, £866m goes into our essential platform, £592m is essentially allocated to training for doctoral students and £482m in the area highlighted towards better exploitation but is really both training and research which is focussed around specific programmes and needs of users. So this is research and training but with a user focus.

Those are delivered by 2 Directorates, within EPSRC, the Research Base Directorate which is headed by Lesley Thompson, who is sitting here at the front of the auditorium and Business Innovation Directorate which is headed by Catherine Coates. The major programmes through which we deliver this funding are highlighted here on the research base and the ones which are in the business and innovation directorate, largely those cross council programmes and user focussed research and training programmes are here. The chemistry programme is in the Physical Sciences programme and that’s headed by Andrew Bourne, who you will be hearing from at the end of the meeting but is also sitting here at the front.

Key points therefore are a major feature of our plan, being those key priorities themes, largely the cross council programmes addressing societal challenges.

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These, if you look at every developed nation in the world, are in fact the same. All our communities have identified those as being important. All the disciplines, those programmes are structured so every discipline can play in turn, and one of the encouraging things I found in the data we pulled together for this international chemistry review was the degree in which the chemistry community was in fact garnering funds from almost all of the programmes that both we funded and our sister research councils were funding. The largest proportion, as I say, is still spent on investigator led research and training. We do have a focus on trying to ensure that research we fund is highly ambitious, but that also requires getting our peer review mechanisms right so that those are funded. But this question of impact is increasingly moving up the government agenda, not just this government but also the opposition, so I think its beholden upon us to make sure where we do identify impact we shout it loud, and its not just the research councils that should shout it loud the academic community should and the end users should.

Why therefore do we do international reviews? Because we have obviously decided our priorities and so on. Well, the international review really is the benchmark that we use to identify the strength of UK research activity. I am a sceptic about the quality of research assessment exercise in determining absolute international excellence. I think it’s a fantastic way of ranking the UK communities one against the other, but in terms of its absolute measure of international excellence I have my doubts. If you look at the amount of international comparison done by the RAEng panel, it’s one, or at the most 2 people. Here we have brought in a whole team of experts in chemistry, and although they haven’t gone into detail into the individual research projects, or individuals within the chemistry community, (that’s what the RAE has done), they I think can really position us and the chemistry that we support in an international context.

We need them to highlight any gaps or missed opportunities, again I don’t think the RAE does that very well, it highlights the strengths or weaknesses of what we are already doing, but it doesn’t identify gaps. It gives us this broad perspective, it isn’t an RAE, it isn’t a detailed review, but it is carried out by international experts who know the international community, who know the research that is going on in that community and can really I think, in a very succinct way as they have in this report, identify the strengths and weaknesses. It helps not just us, but all our stakeholders with future planning and in arguments with Treasury, about future funding.

So we undertake the international reviews with all the relevant institutions and research councils as appropriate and if you look at the front of the report, you will see all of those who were involved in that and I think Jim will probably mention some of them when he is talking about the Steering Committee and how it set the overall programme. It’s a rolling programme which we have been running since 1999. By the end of next years we will in fact have done 2 complete cycles of all the major disciplines that we fund. So this is the second of the chemistry reviews, next year maths is the last of that second five year cycle. The last one was 2002 and I'm sure everybody knows the ‘Whitesides’ review. Everywhere I go I get the ‘Whitesides’ review quoted at me, now it’s going to be the ‘Klein’ review, it will be interesting to hear what people say about the ‘Klein’ review when I visit them.

3 This review has taken 18 months to plan, has involved the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Chemical Engineering, Chemical Industries KTN, ABPI, Institute of Physics, Biochemical Society and our 3 sister research councils. And the review week itself, an incredibly busy week as Mike will tell you, was between 19-24 April.

But with that scene setting in place let me hand over now to Professor Jim Feast, who chaired the Steering Committee which really planned this whole process and enabled it to happen as smoothly as it did.

Jim Feast

I don’t know the process that led me to being asked by David to chair the Steering Committee, but I was asked and I accepted.

The first thing to do was to get the committee together and we got representatives from all these Research Councils and also various learned and professional societies. Now all these things are listed in the report so you don’t need me to go through it and explain what they all are, you can refer to the report. But we got a cross section of those people who have an interest in the welfare and effectiveness of chemistry activity in the UK. The role of the Steering Committee was to assist in the implementation of the international review process and the first job was to get the committee together and then to meet and identify a chairman and we got Professor Mike Klein to chair it, and then he participated in the committees meetings in helping to assemble the panel, and that was very constructive and very helpful, so Mike was really a member of the Steering Committee as well as well as being the actual chair of the Review Panel.

We discussed with Mike in the early stages and then at the end some members of the review committee got together with the panel to discuss things, but this meeting enables the community to continue the discussion.

The report you have is labelled draft but I am told by Ben and Andrew that any major errors identified will be corrected before it becomes set in stone. And then we have to participate in the dissemination of the international review findings to the wider stakeholder community and that’s what is going to happen after Mike has given his presentation and after we have had a discussion of it within this room.

So what did we do? We selected the panel chair, and the members. Nominations were sought from the community. The selection criteria included the area of expertise, the balance internationally. At the last review there was a significant majority of North Americans and this review there were slightly less than half North Americans so we got the balance a bit different. We wanted industrial representation and it’s very difficult to find a high profile industrialist who can spare a week in April to be rushed off their feet. And we wanted to get the gender and age balance right as we all do these days.

Selected departments were visited by the panel and we agreed the list and the schedule. In a week we couldn’t get to everywhere. We agreed the evidence framework; we provided a lot of information to the panel, probably in my view, too

4 much. It was a pretty indigestible mass of stuff, I’m sure the panel scanned it and looked at some of it in great detail and we proved that and EPSRC secretariat organised things and I have nothing but praise for the staff from EPSRC who did the organisation, provided the advice, made sure all the requests and invitations went out to everyone.

We also in the Steering Committee approved the top level questions for the panel. Again, I am not going to go through these, you have all read the report because it was circulated to you all last Friday.

So there was a series of important questions, the Steering Committee thought were important questions, and those were presented to the panel as a guide to what they should be attempting to find out in their review of the material they were given and in their tour of the UK.

OK that’s all you need from me, which is I hope very little. It’s my pleasure now to ask Professor Mike Klein to take over and present his panel of review.

Thanks

Professor Mike Klein

So as I say good morning. First remark is that to come here and meet in the Benjamin Franklin room must be more than a coincidence. Ben Franklin was the founder of the University of Pennsylvania about 275 years ago. We recently celebrated the 300th anniversary of his birth and funnily enough, just before I came here, so last week I was giving a talk at the Romanian Academy in Yash, in the north east of Romania and went for an afternoon stroll with my wife down by the main boulevard, there was a church there that was constructed in 1630 and this is a carving on the side of the church. The church is decorated with these catenated structures and it seemed appropriate to me that a meeting on chemistry should think about that. The thing is when you walked into this church it had left and right handed helices everywhere in the church so let me move on.

So, following Jim I have to give an enormous vote of thanks for everybody that contributed to making this work. Everybody we dealt with within EPSRC was extremely helpful and very persuasive.

In April year ago I was giving the Hinshelwood lectures in Oxford and got a phone call from someone within EPSRC asking me if I would do this, and it wasn’t clear to me that I had the time to devote to this. But a lot of people at Oxford and elsewhere that I know in the UK worked hard on me to accept. Having done the week tour of duty with George Whitesides I knew what was expected and so wasn’t so eager, but nevertheless, having personally benefited from having been educated in the UK, I felt this was a responsibility – payback time.

The Steering Committee was very useful. As Jim said I did attend a couple of the meetings. I think this was profitable for both sides to try and get some realism and in particular to build the committee. Again, getting people to devote a week of their life is not easy these days, particularly if you want high level input.

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The chemistry community also had just been through the torture of RAE and so to expect them as they did in 2001/02, actually Jim was the chair of the 2001 review. I was an external assessor. So I got this information too so I was aware of the torture that everyone goes through. So the fact the community was willing to put themselves out and to give the input here was very, very much appreciated. And in particular on the site visits themselves, obviously a tremendous amount of work by a handful of people at each place was instrumental in helping us in this task. And again, EPSRC staff made this seamless for us who were travelling around. So again, grateful. And the panel, there was a panel of 18 people and everyone of them was useful in multiple ways and this would not have been possible without their input and in particular to cover the space that we did, the panel split into 2, as you probably know, and the sub panel that went down the west of the UK was handled by Andrew Holmes, and I must say that was almost a default on me being the chair. I needed Andrew Holmes because I wanted someone who knew some appreciation of the UK scene to steer the other half, and Andrew did a fantastic job I must say. Having served with him on committees before I had no doubt Andrew was the right guy.

I said here, I already mentioned about Ben Franklin. I should say that the photograph I took of the church, the street opposite that is called Benjamin Franklin Strasse. So great man. I think it’s appropriate that we are in the Society of the Arts honouring Ben Franklin who had no formal training as a scientist; he was a printer’s apprentice who set up the first printing shop, Philadelphia.

This is the quote we picked out on the web when we were doing the review and when you are doing something as daunting as this you need some distraction. Somebody in the committee found this. And I think it’s appropriate. You may or may not agree with it but it’s certainly a mantra in the US.

Our post industrial society in the US will depend heavily on the universities for innovation. We see these great American corporations tumbling one by one so if the US is going to rebuild itself it’s going to have to use the universities.

I’m sure you’ll understand that. That seemed a very appropriate statement. Again this is the common theme wherever we go, we’re facing these daunting challenges and chemistry is central to this. Chemistry must play its role and it’s really up to chemists to articulate this role. No-one’s going to come banging on your door. So just as a matter of interest how many people in the room are chemists? Could you raise your hands? So, great, I’ll repeat that again, it’s for the chemists to articulate their role and not for others to do it for them. OK, so it must play its part.

The research councils also have a challenge, that’s to harness and make available funds for creative or adventurous chemistry as you call it here because the transformational discoveries, which are few and far between, will only come from adventurous research. And my own passion at the moment is contributing to health and well being and that again that’s a role that chemists are uniquely equipped to do and the UK has a grand tradition in that area.

OK again for all of you in the room as chemists do you have the ambition and drive to play your full part in this? That’s not a casual statement. In the US, some of my

6 best friends, some of the most eminent chemists in the world devote time to the political process of representing their discipline and working with the agencies involved in a constructive way to get funding. And the best example I can give you and it’s cited again and again is the energy research centres that were just funded in the universities, 46 centres, more than 30 of them in the universities, multi-million dollar efforts. It’s the culmination of many years work by many people, above and beyond the call of duty to articulate in the political process the need for this. And in fact it was an up hill struggle and we can talk about that later, because we had Senator Gaulle going around, Vice President Gaulle saying we didn’t need science, all we needed was the money and engineering. Yes, so it’s a story I’m going to take a detour to explain.

Last year’s budget mark up contained $100M for university research in energy. When it got to the Senate, it’s a debate process, in the US, right, the White House, Senate and Congress; the Senate has knocked out the $100M for basic research and said that has to go to engineering. So it was zero, when Obama came in and I was one of about 20 people that put in time and effort to produce a little document that was handed out to senatorial and congressional aides as to why you need research. So I’m telling you a story, it might not apply in the UK, but you cannot just say ‘I want to play in my sand box, give me the money please’.

Anyway, that’s a detour. Educating the correct cadre of young scientists… and this is not going to be over in the next decade, we’re with this for at least 50 years or more…. So the future depends on educating the right people to do the job. So are you setting up a structure here that will nurture and mentor for success and that’s what I would say is the core message of our report. And we’ll get to that later on. The challenge demands chemists and as I say for you chemists in the room to work with the various agencies you have, the charities and the funding agencies across all the councils to make this work. If we get it wrong and if there are misrepresentations, in fact I take full responsibility, please, tell us now so we can correct these misconceptions that we have or misrepresentations.

This is the panel. 8 came from the US, 8 from Europe, 1 Australian, and 1 Indian. You could argue there’s no Asian, there no Japanese, no Chinese. We thought long and hard about that. I’m very experienced serving on advisory panels in Japan and other places. I wanted a panel that would tell me what they really thought and there are cultural differences, having served on very high level panels in Japan, it would be very difficult, the word ‘no’ does not exist in Japanese and so I didn’t think, (its not a slight on them, it’s a cultural thing), and so I wanted a panel and fortunately we were in residence with the Steering Committee and I think we got a fabulous, fabulous panel. There they are, we won’t dwell on that. We have a member missing, Bert Meijer, who had to catch a plane home because his own lab was being reviewed that day and he had an honouree degree celebration for a very eminent scientist he had to attend but he hung in there right to the very last minute.

OK so this is what we were asked about. What is the standing and quality from an international perspective, and Dave Delpy dealt with that and whether there was any obvious things that stuck out to this panel in the whirlwind tour that needed to be addressed.

7 There is an executive summary. We’ve pulled together a whole lot of bullets, I’m not going to read through them, you have the report and you can do that. Let’s get to the 8 major question themes. I would say that some of these questions the panel actually felt ill equipped to answer, so many of these are ‘seat of the pants’ judgements. Others that we felt very comfortable with and I think there’s a phrase in the report that says we are asked and the communities are asked to think about things that they are perhaps not trained to answer, such as the economic impact of what we do. That’s not an easy question to answer, usually the economic impact is very long term, casing point I can tell you is my colleague, Alan MacDiarmid, that got the Nobel Prize for conducting polymer work, the work was done in 1976 or published in 1976, unfortunately he’s dead now, but more or less he got his Nobel Prize some 30 years later. It still was a very big industrial product right? But the impact was there and is there and continuing so that’s the difficulty when we researchers try to communicate with our funders that this isn’t necessarily going to be overnight.

So here we go, let’s start at the top.

The Strengths

So we did see on very many places we visited really world class stuff going on. And that’s fantastic, it’s always exciting, it’s actually the highlight for us when we travel around, and I’m sure those that have served on panels would agree with me. We’ve mentioned a few areas here and it’s a culmination of the 2 different site visits we went on, we saw active. A very, very good effort. You know I’m often reluctant to say ‘world leading’ because you know that‘s in the eye of the beholder, you could be world leading in the field that you are the only person working – right? I did that for many years by the way. So I was very lucky because 30 years later people thought what I did then was very interesting. Actually my thesis paper just passed a 100 citations and it was discovered 5 years ago, so more than 40 years after, and I think that’s the web because nobody would have ever found it without the web. So for the last 5 years I think it’s got 8 citations a year so this was a paper 1965. So the wonders of the web! And when I did that it was world leading, I mean nobody in the world could care less.

So the issue is, is it competing at the world level? There’s a lot of stuff going on in the UK that really is competitive on that scale. REA said 15% well… maybe its 10% maybe 20 % maybe 25% but a lot, and you should be pleased about that, but there’s a corollary to that. It means this cadre of people is getting well funded because you don’t compete unless you’re funded… in chemistry, maybe in mathematics you do but not in chemistry. So does anybody take issue with that? We can discuss that later. I think it also tells us that there’s a good level of support for a significant fraction of the people.

In the George Whitesides’ report, and I was part of that team, we were struck by the lack of multidisciplinary efforts and this has expanded noticeably through many avenues and we can talk about that later. The industry frontier. The UK was pretty unique, the interactions with industry for good and perhaps not so evidently good, when the ‘Whitesides’ report came around, it was obviously a unique feature in the UK, this interleaving in the sense that the research was collaborative. If we go back

8 20 years the big industrial corporations in the US were throwing money over the fence to academics that were in good universities, just to stay in touch with them, there was nothing demanded. Even in my case when I moved from Canada to the US, IBM came visit me and gave me $100,000 cheque every year for several years – didn’t want anything back. Those days are gone – long gone. So when we came in the ‘Whitesides’ time it was striking to us that the American corporations were going down in this area and the UK were still pretty vibrant. What we’ve seen, (the change here), there seemed to be, it’s a perception, a lot of spin-out companies, I use the phrase ‘vigorous and successful’. Start-up companies are often vigorous and they fail right, but the issue is enthusiasm and there seems to be a willingness on the younger people to do that. But we also saw examples of fabulously successful, one of which I believe was capitalised, floated at $1billion, this is phenomenal on any scale. So that was exciting. And we saw a whole variety of studentships funded through industry, some of which were imaginative programmes for doing this and others which were the more standard ones.

OK, so the stunning thing to everyone on the committee was the level of investment in buildings and kits as you call them, so the infrastructure here is enormously evolved even since 2001 I’d say. So how many people in the room now work in new buildings with new infrastructure? No, let me do it the other way round, how many don’t work in new buildings? Oh, so nobody has a new chemistry building where you work? How many do have new buildings? (voice from audience – ‘it depends what you mean by new’) even renovated, renovated with government funds? Renovated with private funds? OK one – two. OK that’s good, alright, so not everybody? So maybe we got the wrong tour? And what about equipment? Does everybody have access to good NMR equipment? Good mass spec, good standard chemical analysis tools? Yes? Who doesn’t? Not a single person in the room. OK, so I think that to us is striking, it may seem mundane but it was striking. And so the only place I have personally visited where I would see more is a Max Planck institute where you would see evidence of more technicians typically, but not necessarily better equipment. Other people would agree – that’s our perception.

So that’s one level, the next thing is what about the early career researchers. So everywhere we went we did get an hour to chat to a random selection, and in many places they said if they had known we wanted to talk to them one on one, they might have selected different people, but I think it was good that they didn’t have that advance warning where we went. And so this was fantastic to see the verse in every sense and that can be a strength, the community here can capitalise on that, they seem to be bright, motivated.

The downside was, although this was very refreshing to see, practically every single person in the room had a different fellowship or different mode of support. Only a small fraction of them had a well defined career path ahead of them. The overwhelming view was if they just hang in there by some means or other by their fingernails eventually they would find a job. And this I thought was really unfortunate, that this was a pervasive view, perhaps we got it wrong, but that’s what we thought.

There were examples where we went where first class science was being accompanied by the development novel instrumentation. Novel in the good sense that capabilities were being developed on site in universities in labs that would be

9 unique on the planet which is a good, good example of the vibrancy of the community. So I think that’s a very positive side.

Ok, so having been on the ‘Whitesides’ report, and seen the effects of a grenade being thrown in the room, I think its fantastic to see how the community has evolved. I mean the sorts of topics that people were talking to us about are very, very different and that’s a great thing for the future. The multi disciplinarity has evolved in a good sense and there are some terrific examples here of regional interactions which should be encouraged, the mechanisms involved, we talk a bit about that in the report, we are not experts in the UK scene, but the little we picked up seemed there should be mechanisms to do that. We were preoccupied back in the ‘Whitesides’ report, with this issue of graduate education, coming from the US where 5 years in the mandatory time to finish, but in practice 6 years is very common and even longer sometimes, we were concerned last time, so I would say there is, from the perception of the panel, there is a drift in the right sense, the right sense being our polarised view that there is a movement in the better sense to focus more on achievement rather than a 3 year certificate of attendance.

OK, weaknesses

So having said that you have some fabulous young researchers here and some of them are supported under schemes that seem to be able to evolve to a real career, I would say that overall the panel really was not impressed with the way these young people are being mentored and treated.

The other thing which is a corollary to that is the grant support and one place we met….. so we were visiting in April and the one person had started in September and they had submitted 15 proposals from September to April. So this was somebody in a post doctoral fellowship, so how much time had they spent to do research as a post doc? When I was a post doc many, many years ago I never wrote proposals, I did research and that’s why I was a post doc. Maybe there should be a job here for people that write proposals – by the way – they exist in the US and I know my colleagues in Europe who participate in big projects, hire PhD people to write proposals. But I think somebody in a post doc fellowship should not be writing grant proposals but that’s a view that the panel shared and was worried to see somebody who had seriously put in 15 proposals.

This other weakness is about diversity. This to somebody coming from wherever we come is a failure in the pipeline, because the diversity issue, even if you deal with just male/female right up Royal Society Research Fellowship or EPSRC fellowships, the representation of females is very good, and somehow in the faculty level it dies. And this is a weakness, you as a society and members of societies are going to have to address. And you must address it. So that features centrally in the report.

The other thing was everybody, everybody, I mean I visited 4 locations, and the other team 4 locations, but it was across the board, everybody was proud of their new instrumentation and new kit but nobody had thought of how they were going to sustain it and what would happen if a big piece of instrumentation breaks; there’s a guy here frowning…but that’s an exception. Remember I had 10 minutes to, and actually nobody showed me facilities. When I was in Edinburgh I walked down a

10 corridor, I saw this room full of shiny things but we raised this question when we were in Leeds and people seemed shell shocked…you know ‘if it breaks it breaks’. How are you going to deal with that – I think that’s an issue for you as a community.

And then the last bullet here as a weakness which I think is incredibly important, I mean you know when we arrived in the UK there were petitions on the PMs website and every magazine that mentions the word science were full of things that I don’t have to elaborate on here, but clearly that was a subtheme and I was very pleased that we were able to get through the review without that dominating.

So what about the framework findings? So there are strengths and weaknesses here and I would say the report deals more with the weaknesses than the strengths but here are the summary findings:

There is good impact but it is uneven and that would be true anywhere. It would be true in US, in Switzerland, wherever, but the important point is you have islands of excellence and excellence can be at the level of department, it can be at the level of themes, it can be at the level of individuals, but you have it.

The international collaborations, I guess the pragmatic realities of funding in Europe are such that the links are very strong with Europe and so that was evident. It may exist, but it wasn’t showcased in any extent, links to the US, perhaps there aren’t worthwhile funding streams to make that worth the effort, but certainly we saw them to Europe and heard some to China and other places. The crucial thing is and I think it’s important that the links to Europe were working.

And then the corollary to that having built fine instrumentation, the cyclotron and if you think of ISIS and things like that then foreign researchers come here and it doesn’t escape the committee that if someone is coming up for a sabbatical, the UK is one of the top choices to go. Now people wouldn’t come here if it was really hopeless for doing research so I mean you have a good environment, so I think that’s good for the future.

We couldn’t escape the feeling, the committee going around, again perhaps a perception, but that there was a risk adverse culture here with the penalty of failure being too high. The types of projects that people were telling us about overall seemed to have a low horizon and the funding – we discussed that in the report – the funding policies are probably not encouraging, let’s say the mechanism is not encouraging sufficiently transformative research. So the issue here of the mentoring and inadequate funding is something we come back to a bit and something we discuss in the report and that was highlighted at a number of places we visited about the contrast with some other countries where start up to get going in your early career is very standard. This issue came up again about the early career researchers and this is an issue as a community you are going to have to address.

So the situation here for the societal impact is I would say very good overall, but there’s more to be done. When we think in comparison to 7 years ago, there’s huge evolution, but the world doesn’t stand still. So what was going on in other countries in 2000, maybe you’re competitive now, but things have moved on. The integration between disciplines is relentlessly moving forward there is seamless structure, I

11 mean, many, many universities in the US. Somebody from the hospital can be doing a PhD in my department, even though I don’t have an affiliation. A chemical engineer sits out in my group, I have no particular affiliation with that department, I have physics student sitting out in my group – I don’t have an appointment in the physics department, people in my group get hired in bio-engineering. So this is… I mean you’re moving in the right direction but it’s still a long way to go to being a complete process.

So, Dave Delpy highlighted this and I would say there is an awareness where we go around and we talk offline to people, there is an awareness but there doesn’t seem to be an adequate funding stream to tap, because in the end somebody has to pay the bills if you’re going to go out and hire researchers so again this is an issue of dialogue. How do you persuade from the political level down to the research councils down to you as bench chemists, how do you take advantage of that? Again, the exciting areas going forward are going to involve multi-disciplinary, not inter- disciplinary we’ve passed the stage where just having a chemist and a physicist is enough, its fine for building device materials but its not if you then want to integrate that into a medical device. So if you want to do non-invasive blood flow then maybe you should be working with surgeons or something. I mean this is the new…I mean people do it here, this guy’s done it but this applies to almost every area we work in.

So a great…I mean I don’t follow daily what’s going on in the UK so the doctoral training centres seem a wonderful, wonderful idea, and seems to have been a great thing. We’ve had for many years in the US, programmes from the funding agencies Igots and other things, all the government agencies to fund these things to cut across funding streams but it seems to be working here, and the thing that we were excited about on the panel was the fact there was 4 years programmed in, so that was in the right direction.

We heard some good examples of translational research in several places and that was very good and I already mentioned the spin-outs. This was impressive.

OK so this is an interesting point here. So some places we went to we heard the intellectual property was a problem and that was also tied in with other issues like cost recovery, paying overheads on grants, but other places we saw very successful partnerships. So there’s a whole array of different things going on. We’ve seen industries cohabiting with departments at one location and at other locations where industry had built buildings, paid for faculty positions and so on. So I would say it’s very good to have this diversity of possibilities which I added here, but didn’t highlight. But it seems to me at least up till now you’ve had an advantage or you’ve handled it very well, so the challenge is going to be can you sustain this now with the economic downturn? I mean we couldn’t escape without having to deal with this issue head on so the message from the panel is this is a two way street and to quote Graham Fleming, panel member. Graham a very eminent scientist, a fellow at the Royal Society, he’s a member of the national academy, he’s the Vice Pro of Research at Berkley, arguably the greatest chemist department on the planet, so he knows what he’s talking about and he says:

‘The research councils and researchers are married and divorce is not an option. Separation is not an option’

12

So this is why we are here, I think it’s a two way street so the chemistry community has to work with the research councils and similarly the research councils have to work with the academic chemistry. Having said that, the panel was surprised in some of the ways the proposals are reviewed. We know coming to England is different, you drive on the other side of the road to begin with, so we know it’s different. However, the fact that you have panels convene to review proposals, but the panel is not allowed to express their own opinion on proposals is bizarre but this is a personal view. And you can quote me on that – it’s very strange! I’m sure it can be justified legally and whatever else, it’s still very strange to convene a bunch of eminent people and have them sit there and not express a personal opinion of what’s being discussed. Actually it’s a waste of talent. So peer review should be sought and considered at all stages of the proposal.

International advice – easy to say, perhaps impossible to implement. However, there is an issue of critical mass. Suppose I was living in the UK and perhaps I could find five other people of common interest across the UK. We could write a joint proposal to do something collectively, individuals could not do. Who would review that proposal? We’ve now exhausted everybody in the UK in this discipline – how do you handle that? So, strategically it might be wise for me to only work with three of the five people so two are left to review it. So grantsmanship, if you’re professors at university you’re intelligent people, so you’ll optimise any situation. However, there is a perceived problem to the panel in the way the resources are distributed there. I’m happy to talk more about that if people want…again, this probably needs some external advice, maybe the panel’s wrong here but overall we didn’t like that. So there are suggestions on how to do that. It’s easy for us to make suggestions, whether they can be implemented or not is another issue.

And I think it beholds all of us to think about as Dave Delpy says, the consequences of what we are doing in the broader social context. Now if we submit a National Science Foundation proposal the very abstract has to have two pieces to it – it has to be the science we are doing and it has to be part B: what is the consequence of this. In other words why should the taxpayer support this? And if you don’t have that part B it’s a large sucking sound, it goes, it doesn’t even get reviewed, it dies at stage one. So even young people are asked to think about that. I guess the weight you would put on that is a different issue. To a large extent we train people as graduate students and post docs for their careers so that is a benefit to society. But were also asked to think about the broader issues in the US so to us this isn’t strange. So I think the academics in the UK overall need to play a more positive role in that arena. Many of them are already doing exemplary work I should say.

So in the end the focus of the report has drifted away from worrying about which particular science you should do into these sort of higher level things I would say. The first thing is going back to these young researchers, you have managed to capture a good cadre of young people, they are very diverse, they come in every sense from different countries and so on, so how can you capture them the brightest of the bright we talk about that in the review so I think that’s the number one thing.

How do you maintain this infrastructure that most of you have even if it’s not all of you of new buildings, new facilities, how are you going to sustain that going forward?

13 Dave Delpy’s graph showing the income – its flattened out and its even going down, I mean are you thinking about that, as a community, how are you going to deal with that? So…unless you’re going to elect an Obama or money is going to rain from heaven…it’s something you’ve really go to be thinking about.

We did see beautiful examples of pooling of things so it’s quite natural to imagine in the different regions that if the regional funders…if I translate to my situation in the US, the state of Pennsylvania, can you persuade the state of Pennsylvania to put money into your activities. I direct and still do for a few more days the materials lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Well a bunch of my colleagues got together and were able to leverage the federal money we get to an equal amount of money coming in for the state of Pennsylvania and we’ve seen examples of that in our travelling around the country and its mainly justified at the state level by the jobs that are created, the technical people that get hired and the people that get recruited even as post docs, and students are spending money in the local economy. And so we saw good examples of that and I think that needs to be built on.

I would say this is really crucial…So again let me say that…we heard people complaining about 20% success rates, maybe I've got that wrong but that’s the number we were told. I compete at NIH with a 12% success rate…and we’re not marching in the streets with banners and placards…so just to calibrate you. I don’t see anything wrong with 12% success rate – you’re not there yet so – the problem is what we think to get that success rate, it’s affecting the kinds of proposals that get written. Again this is a perceived thing right – I haven’t read all the proposals – but the impression we are getting is that people are optimising their chances of success by not picking high risk projects.

The next thing is I think it’s crucial too for the chemistry community to buy into this, and we can talk about this in the questions period, because we were asked to comment on the grand challenges that were being evolved for chemistry and we chose not to do that. And so the student support issue is through the length of the PhD and we saw on one example where the quality of the research was enhanced by the ability to hire foreign graduate students and that seems to me…that’s a sub- theme here, but seems to me to be very important going forward. How can you solve that issue?

The issue of mentoring young people, I’ve given a reference here, I could have given many others, but the finding agencies in the US have decided that the success rate for people within 10 years of a PhD, the success rate should be the same as of grey haired people like me! So that’s their way of dealing with it…there maybe other ways of dealing with it but you corral around a subset of money. So its very common if I get a rejected proposal to say Mike if this was your first proposal we would have funded it but unfortunately we expect you to do a bit better than that. Again that’s the situation I live in and we’re not complaining about it so there are creative ways to make sure young scientist succeed.

So there were members of the panel that felt very strongly about the special role the UK has had over the years in the pharmaceutical arena, how it’s contributed blockbuster drugs over the years and as the pharmaceutical industry is undergoing massive changes, can the UK university community capitalise on this? There was a

14 strong feeling that the chemistry community is well placed to do that and it is going to need some creative thinking at all levels I would say. But nevertheless it seemed to us there was an opportunity. There was an area we expected to hear about as a panel but didn’t. That doesn’t…it may be going on in the UK but nowhere was it really highlighted for us. The fact that probes of nano scale are going on in medicine that involve proteins or manipulating proteins involve chemistry, and we expected to see that, it may be going on in the UK…there are big international meetings all round the world on nano medicine we never heard about that and surprised many people on the panel. So again if anyone in the audience can correct us on that, but we think there are areas of obvious opportunity, whether they graft onto the UK I’m not sure.

I’m a card carrying computational chemist and was disappointed that the UK, which 20 years ago was a leader in this area and 30 years ago was a leader in this area, I think has slipped very badly, my perception. And you had another eminent member of the panel, Michele Parrinello and he was in agreement that. We just never saw enough examples of how computational chemistry was hand in hand with synthetic chemists. I mean it’s quite normal in my department for a bio-chemist to come into my office and want help with something or a synthetic organic chemist will come in and chat to me about things, I even published with an organic chemist. So I think the UK has slipped there – I don’t know why it has slipped, it was world leading 20 years ago and is no longer, and that’s to your loss if you are going to move into these areas, somehow that needs to be nurtured.

This is something again, if we got it wrong you guys tell us about it, but the younger people I were chatting to that had been post docs in Germany or who had been post docs in US then coming back to set up a lab, they don’t have this $1/2M sapphire laser system or they don’t have a dilutionary fridge at the end of the optical tables, I mean this just came up time and time again. So this issue of start up is I would say actually damaging physical chemistry in the UK. You might not agree, but that’s the impression the panel got and in areas like this where you’re going to be developing tools and techniques you need more than physicists, you also need people that think about molecules and that’s missing – somehow it’s slipping through the crack.

OK so into specifics, there are many, many recommendations at various places in the report but there are some suggestions pulled out here for the main ones, so I don’t know if it’s practical – can you as a community somehow reorganise things – maybe it’s a totally impractical suggestion but why can’t you have a standard early career path. I mean some institutions have it under a different name but it seemed to us there should be a well defined career path. In fact it’s astonishing to the panel coming from the outside, you have a socialist government in this country but you don’t have a career path for young people – (JF – we don’t have a socialist government either) - so you mean you’re going to get one after the next election? It’s still astonishing to us coming from the outside – on a human resources basis the one way young chemists are brought into academia is a crazy process. Now I know you’re going to tell us you’ve been doing this for 700 years and therefore it must be right but its not just me speaking here anybody on the panel would have spoke to this, even the Germans on the panel would have endorsed it. So is there…so we have a sense that there’s enough money going into the system because there are so many different kinds of fellowships, so there’s a whole potpourri of things that people contribute to. Somehow if this could be corralled into one big heap and distributed –

15 perhaps the research councils and the Royal Society have to rethink maybe not only do they get these fellowships but they come with start up, maybe there should be half the number of these and they come with resources. Perhaps we got it wrong but it seems to me some creative thinking is needed there.

I keep saying me, it’s not just me speaking.

So I think this should be taken seriously, how do you build and sustain the facilities that chemists and the people that they work with going forward. It’s a problem we face in the US, technical staff paying for maintenance on equipment, these are real issues, they’re continuing battles the central administrations have to contribute and so on.

So I cant help putting this here because depending on who we talk to, so if you talk to the government side, the funders, to some extent the fully economic cost recovery… so again we write a proposal in the US to buy a multi million dollar electro microscope and we promise in that proposal to feed and nurture it. What does that mean? It means the university of administration is signing the proposal, not the investigator and they have to look after it. So from the point of view of the funders the grants we get have overhead on them and so the institution is getting the money, but then the institution turns round and says I have to pay the gas bill or I have to pay the water or the lights…so something’s not working and the community has to address that. I think going forward it’s a community issue, I don’t know how you solve it but it’s something that has to be solved.

So pooling, I already mention here we saw some great examples that were effective at all levels and that maybe the key to success is here. This came up in a discussion in Leeds where the people that were not from Leeds were concerned that the message we were giving here is that we should be closing some chemistry departments. My response to that was ‘if that’s necessary, yes, but that isn’t what we are suggesting’. If you have enough undergraduate students coming in why would you want to close it? And I only say that about the under graduates because of the funding in the UK is different from other countries. In the US we have institutions that focus on under graduates and others that focus on research – I could list them for you but you have eminent examples of both, but here it’s different. The thinking about here was maintaining sophisticated instrumentation and critical mass in particular areas. How are you going to solve that issue? And I think that comes up several times in the report.

I guess the offline discussions centred mostly on this, the community at large seems to feel there should be more responsive mode funding and there’s lots of discussion with people in different disciplines about whets going wrong with the present system. I already talked about that – the business of input into decision process, but this input here is referring to multiple levels, not just the panels but the process – how’s the whole process constructed

We heard time and time again and the discussions within the panel suggested that there should be perhaps a cap that somehow very large grants should be separated from let’s say more blue sky type. This might encourage more active, more imaginative blue sky type research, if a really adventurous proposal was competing –

16 was not competing with a huge piece of instrumentation, or somebody buying a robot array or something…But again that’s something for the community to think through.

I felt passionately and so did the other physical chemists, and there was a number of us on the panel, that felt this was creating stress on the kind of work that was being done. Of course we saw exceptions, of course there are always exceptions, but overall we felt that that was an issue. And this as I said follows on from ‘Whitesides’ and a lot of discussion within the panel about this and the outcome was just a plea for flexibility so if a particular researcher on a particular project is going in a good direction there shouldn’t be…the guillotine shouldn’t come down there should be flexibility in the system for this particular person to maybe use another year, but certainly not beyond five. So this is not a plea to copy the Americans system, not at all, its an issue of achievement being paramount and time served – so be it if someone can finish in 2 ½ years, fantastic, if they need three or four…but there shouldn’t be a stigma attached to it because research is research and it isn’t necessarily going to the plot.

I think we’re pretty well coming to the end. I’ll just say a little bit – how much time have I got Mr Chairman? OK.

So grand challenges. We, we meaning the panel, did hear a bit about from EPSRC about something that started maybe a year ago or 9 months ago trying to identify challenges for the chemistry community and the panel’s convinced, and from what Dave Delpy said in his opening remark, that EPSRC seems convinced that the fact that one works on these grand challenges doesn’t preclude some fantastic science and it’s really up to the community here to define where its going to go.

I mentioned in my opening remark that even though I do not work in energy science I participate – I was one of a panel about 25 people that produced this booklet that was handed to congressional for a senatorial aide. I don’t imagine that my local senator read this thing, don’t get me wrong but the aides that work for these people in the US feel very lucky if they have a bachelor degree – so that’s the level at which you have to communicate to sell your ideas. This is not easy and so what this particular document was, was a synthesis of many previous documents but trying to pitch to the real issue, which the particular issue in the US at the time was new science for a sustainable energy future and I think that’s what I was eluding to – the community at large cannot escape this responsibility.

I can’t stress enough that chemistry is centre to that – George Whitesides was pushing that in 2002 already, that chemistry is at the centre and so again for you guys to define where you fit in.

Dave Delpy has mentioned that this is a priority for 2009/11, but I don’t think you should hesitate, I think, if they don’t exist, working groups should be created to start articulating where resources should go. In the case of the US and it might not apply here, the document that I helped prepare followed on from about a dozen other documents over the Bush years. So we were in the wilderness in the Bush years let me tell you but we didn’t waste that time as a community, we still tried to articulate where the science support was needed and in fact when money was available we

17 were able to capitalise on it as a community. Me personally, I didn’t get any of this money. But talking to the community helped.

This is something one of the committee members, Graham Fleming was involved in. I tried hard to persuade Mark Rattner to join the panel and Mark said to me ‘I don’t know anything about the way UK chemistry works and if I’m only there for a week I’m going to leave more confused that I am now’… so he said ‘I can’t be of any use to you’. But Graham Fleming did agree to come – I don’t think he was right by the way I think he was just telling me politely he was very busy. But this is the type of thing I’m talking about. Graham Fleming and Mark Rattner put together this thing here ‘five challenges for science and the imagination’ and this is why I was telling you when we come in here, there doesn’t seem to be available to people in the UK the ability to think at this kind of level. Now I’m sure individuals do, don’t misunderstand me, because there are brilliant people – there are just as many statistically brilliant people in the UK as in the US but the idea that two of the greatest scientists we have would come together and produce a document that talks about the imagination is…perhaps I’m pushing this too hard but this is what I think this community here has to do for whatever area it sees are opportunities for chemistry.

So let’s get the sum up – I think overall it’s in a much better state, chemistry, and in some sense not a surprise because there’s been a big influx of money. You have high quality work going on, and it’s not in one place. You have a lot of young scientists, and so you’re in this community position to produce the next generation of leaders, but we see some gaps…

What about the vision? We’ve talked at length about that. One way out of that would be here…would certainly help. And I think a dialogue on…what are the mechanisms needed to handle that, I think is worthwhile.

There is always going to be a discussion about the core vs. multi centre activities. I must say that overall the panel didn’t think it was badly out of whack here…but again this has to be fine-tuned to your local situation. People that have researched the benefits from collaborative research, from activities in centres probably feel there should be more of that, people who are intrinsically individuals that work on their own probably thing there’s too much going in that area, but each community has to come to its own equilibrium there.

It’s clear that there are opportunities for chemistry in many areas, this is not news to many of you because when we saw the presentation of grant funding it was pleasing to see that chemistry as a whole…I think EPSRC was only 20% of the funding of chemistry – have I got that wrong? So it means that the chemists already are good at getting out there and shaking the trees to get the money. And there’s likely more out there is the message. I think this is an issue, a real issue, again it’s a perception to us on a quick whirlwind visit, but unless you’re going to get an Obama type windfall of money coming into science, this is something that has to be thought about going forward.

18 So here with the young researchers, I think we’ve advanced noticeably from the ‘Whitesides’ report, and I’ve said several times, and its the number one recommendation, that some thought be given to changing this or evolving this to a more equitable system.

So here’s another challenge in which the UK has benefited from in the past and it’s going to require effort to make sure it keeps its current good situation. In the evolving situation in the chemicals and pharmaceutical industries around the world, the shifting roles of China, India and other locations, how does the UK keep its cherished place in the drug discovery pipeline and the chemical industry…and we talk a little bit about that in the report.

But chemistry...academic chemistry, is benefiting from this in the UK and I think some high level thinking about how to keep that is going to be called for.

So this again is where the panel was unanimous that although we see the words on paper, in our whirlwind visit we didn’t see much activity in energy research by chemists…I think we saw only one example. It may be there, maybe people just chose not to tell us about it.

So I think that’s more or less it. So that’s another snapshot from this church in Romania, across the road from Ben Franklin Street and the stain glass windows feature in catenated structures, so I’m finished.

David Delpy

Thank you very much Mike. What we are going to do now is the four of us will be on the front of the stage here. This is your opportunity, as an audience to ask Mike and Jim, largely, the questions that have come out of this report. I’m happy to answer questions on behalf of EPSRC but you can get me at anytime, whereas you’ve only got Jim for this hour, hour and quarter, so over to you really.

Jim Feast

I think the UK chemistry community is really very indebted to this platform, whether we like what we see or not is another matter but I think it’s most perceptive and now having said that lets get on with it . Who wants to start?

Judith Howard, University of Durham

Just first of all Mike, thank you very much for all your efforts on behalf of the UK community from all of us. But just to correct a factual error, which I think is on page 20 of the bound version, today, the panel have interpreted comments on the closure of the number of days ISIS is running – have you been told that already?

MK – I got emails about that.

JH - yes fine because its not a question of closing for a 100 days but it may be open for as little as 100 days and there is currently another questionnaire for the ability for members who feel very strongly about it to get to the EPSRC/government

19

MK – yes so just as a point of qualification there. I know for instance in say a typical cyclotron in the US it might run 200 days per year because it has to be down for servicing and maintenance. I didn’t actually visit ISIS on this occasion it was the other part of the panel. For clarification again could you say what the situation is there?

JH – the clarification is that lets say it could be operation for 220 days, it’s been down to 180, and its going to 150, there’s a threat of 120 or lower. Now in other words if you run only for 120 days a year we are loosing an awful lot of opportunity.

MK – yes well that was the sense of the remark in the report, that we found this . actually disappointing or unacceptable so you endorsing that or not?

JH – yes we are saying it’s unacceptable and it’s very disappointing. I think the point is it’s factually incorrect. I think you say ‘it’s going to be closed for 100 days, not open’.

MK – yes well I’m happy to take an email with more appropriate appraisal.

David Brown, Institute of Chemical Engineers

First of all can I welcome the report on behalf of our community, particularly the stress on early career researchers which I think is crucial, very good to hear.

You do however in the report make a number of comments about the very limited linkage between chemistry and chemical engineering, indeed you refer at one point to that being a dangerous gap, I wonder if you can expand on how you think we might address that?

MK – so I think two members of the panel were card carrying chemical engineers so the origin of those remarks really go back to them, but in fact we never had a presentation from a chemical engineer so…I know its only a superficial view, so none of the departments that we visited felt that this was a high priority thing within the department otherwise surely we would have been exposed to this? So that’s one issue.

I mean I personally happen to know of programmes that do involve chemical engineers in the UK, but perhaps you can enlighten us as to what we’ve missed? I mean are there combined degree programmes, are there joint doctoral training centres…I mean I could go on and on. It wasn’t evident in this whirlwind visit that such things existed. So again to give you an example of where I’m coming from, I just graduated a chemical engineering PhD and this young lady has just gone off to be a post doc in Wisconsin. I don’t even hold an appointment in the chemical engineering department in my university. So, you can have these collaborations without them being formal, so what are the informal metrics? We didn’t see those informal metrics but perhaps they exist. And again happy to be corrected and amend the report if we’ve missed something.

20 DB – I think your analysis is correct, I guess the concern is how we do more to rectify it, the gap that still seems to exist in some areas.

MK – so the gap as I see it again is that chemical engineering…the chemical engineering in the US had undergone profound change with the evolution of...let’s say in the growth of molecular basis for bio engineering. So what the chemical engineering/bio engineering community does in the US, which is unfortunately where I live and that’s where I’m familiar with, leads to emphasising less in industrial processes I would say, right, and that side of chemical engineering…they’ve evolved to be more molecular based, so more obviously linked to chemistry. Where I see the links again in the US is people doing catalysis, I mean that was a strength here if we go back 20+ years right – the catalytic side that is represented here right …are the inputs from the petroleum industry…and this is just not my field – I think is for you guys to correct us – these are a strong vibrant interface in chemistry and chemical engineering.

Let me give you an example of where I’m really coming from. You go to Berkley the chemical engineering department and the chemistry department are side by side and many of the faculty have cross appointments in both departments, it’s a seamless interface. That doesn’t stop the chemical engineers working with Chevron nearby or new catalysts, it doesn’t stop them publishing with their chemistry colleagues on fundamental statistical mechanics. But they have co-habited since the existence of the department. At my university they severed themselves 100 years ago from chemistry, they’re very proud of their independence. They celebrated their 100th birthday in the chemical engineering department recently, whereas in chemistry we’re a lot older than that. But that doesn’t stop us collaborating. So I’d say they went through this severage and they come back together now as the molecular basis of what’s going on becomes more and more paramount. But please, I’m happy to take an email to correct.

DB - thank you.

Paul O’Brien, Head of Year, Chemistry, University of Manchester

I think a very perceptive report. I just want to pick out three things where I think you’ve hit some kind of nail on the head. First was early career staff, early career researchers. We strive very hard to give them a tenure track structure, but we have a great diversity. This type of position grew out of the last recession in the UK universities when we didn’t have new academics and it leaves me to ask to a radical thought that I had this morning which is ‘really should research councils fund such people? Isn’t the job creating tenure track positions that of the university and the research councils should fund their research?’ and I think that’s an interesting thing. That’s one of the things that leads to disparity, it’s a radical thought and I think that you did very well to pick up on it and it’s one that worries me as a head because I have to make commitments. Just to reassure you, we’ve got two physical chemists who got enormous start up packages because they tied into big university initiatives so physical chemistry with us has done rather well out of that.

21 MK – Can I deal with that first? I would say that’s great news, of course in the US by and large the primary agencies do not support five year fellowships, there are exceptions, but overall that is not a mechanism to enter into university positions. You’re absolutely right. The exception of course would be the hospital where nobody has…I mean the subset of people that have tenured positions in the US is very small and they’re all soft money people.

PB -I wanted to say I think you hit on a problem of enormous complexity in sustaining of funding for major equipment and that’s an enormous complexity in sustaining the funds for major equipment because of the way universities run their finances and there’s a debate that needs to go between HEFCE universities and the research councils to rationalise that because I have to fight to set my budget to get that.

And the final point is you mentioned gaps in the intellectual core. The problem is I have to fight for the intellectual core in my discipline and it wastes a lot of my time because too many people think its dead and moribund and actually I know physical chemists are important and I know people who understand the phase rule are important and polymer chemists even, Jim, and all sorts of strange people are important.

Mark Searle, University of Nottingham

Can I go back to your earlier point about the interaction between chemists and chemical engineers. One of the very first science and innovation awards actual funded this sort of interaction. So in Nottingham we do have a multi-million pound project that in which there are lecturers from chemical engineering located within chemistry and vice versa so…

MK – what is the theme of that centre?

MS – well it’s fairly broadly based. I mean there are five people appointed in different key areas which are currently priority areas for the school so I think it is encouraging that interaction and there is some of it going on. I’m sorry you didn’t pick it up when you came to visit us at Nottingham.

MK – that’s an oversight.

Dave Garner, Royal Society of Chemistry and also University of Nottingham

Again, as the community has done can I thank you and your team for a most perceptive report that should give this community a lot of confidence as to what it has achieved and what it can achieve and I think that will be fed in to ambitions and changes in the future.

Let me just say one or two things that I think you are aware of. The Royal Society of Chemistry has worked very hard to make sure there is a good dialogue between the community and EPSRC and the other research councils and that is ongoing and will be continued and what we stressed to EPSRC on behalf of the community is in a way it isn’t so much in a way what they say, its the perception of what they said, and

22 there has been a communications gap in certain areas that I’m not going to raise, but you’ve seen some of the flack that has been flying around.

In terms of societal challenges the Royal Society of Chemistry has produced what we call a road map, which identifies actually seven key challenges and that is being released and will be released and hopefully we will have a positive influence on, again, some of the aspects which you have noted.

We will take on board particularly two things you have indicated because I think now working with the universities we can look at what can be done to set a more clear tenure track, if that’s what you want to call it, pathway for early career researchers. You’re right and there are many universities have got a good calibre and a good number of those people and they are our future and we must nurture them.

Also, and as Paul’s indicated, there is a major challenge that the universities have to address. In terms of regional collaboration, not least in terms of maintaining this high quality class of equipment, and sometimes within the university sector there is what I call a ‘silo mentality’ – they want to preserve their independence and that has to be broken down to a point out the advantages of that. There are two examples particularly in Scotland and what has happened in Manchester on my left show what can be achieved.

And then my final comment which echos what David Brown from the IChemE has said is RSC and IChemE are working very closely to try and get some initiatives, which will facilitate a breaking down of this unfortunate interface between chemistry and chemical engineering.

MK – yes thank you David. I think you’ve picked up on, and I’m very pleased to hear, there are real initiatives that we had not picked up on. One more time though with the chemical engineering, the severing of chemical engineering from chemistry coincided really with the birth of industrial processes [laughs] and maybe you know some chemists thought this was too grubby to worry about but they’ve come back again and I am pleased that there are actual things going on. But let me just summarise that by saying do you think it’s OK, the current level are we going in the right direction here or are we totally off the mark, everything is happy it’s perfect? You can email me if you don’t want to talk in public.

JF – can I just draw one conclusion so far from the comments we’ve got. I think one of the things identified is that a lot of things need to be addressed, but they don’t need to be addressed just by the chemistry community, they need to be addressed by the Higher Education Funding Councils, by the committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, and all the Research Councils, maybe even RCUK.

Matthew Davidson, University of Bath

Thanks Jim, just to add a quick comment to what David said. I’m in the department of chemistry and we just got a £7.5M DTC grant for a doctoral training centre at exactly the interface of chemical engineering and chemistry. We discussed that at the West side of the panel but you were obviously somewhere on the east at that time but we can give you more detail if that’s helpful.

23

MK – yes, just send a brief email, we’ll make sure that’s amended.

Guy Orpen, University of Bristol

A very large number of the issues you have raised relate to the relationship between the chemistry community, EPSRC and the universities collectively. I’m amazed…we have somebody form Russia here but we have nobody from HEFCE here or any funding council or UUK. Is nobody on the Steering Group from those stakeholders? And those are the people that will take the FEC money in who will, in the case of universities, it’s HEFCE and the other funding councils who will pay chemists to educate students and if they get their numbers wrong then the chemistry departments will go broke, because if you have a four or five year PhD in England you get no co- support from HEFCE for the last two or three years, the last two years of that education. So there are strong structural problems which are not the review panels business, but they are absolutely EPSRC’s business. They are co- stakeholders that we have got to engage with essentially talking to a subset of the right community here. We must be talking to those people who make this….

MK – so in the UK do you have the equivalent of what we have that’s called OMB? – the Office of Management and Budgets. So if I go to a meeting, which I did recently out on the West coast, trying to build a synchrotron, people from NIH were there, people from NSF were there, some of the key scientists were there and somebody from the office of Management and Budget is there to make sure the country’s money is being spent correctly, I mean they don’t want this community doing a deal with NIH behind their back. The government is watching and these are intelligent people typically PhD scientists, more intelligent than congressional aides and these are intelligent people and also trained as accountants…

GO – these people are in the Treasury in the UK are they are very smart and they are very, very influential and it’s them that we have to thank for the doubling of the UK science budget over the last decade. The connection with the university sector is problematic and not easy. As it is in US, but there are two systems as it were. Sorry, after all that commentary, question – are there too many PhDs in UK chemistry?

MK – Gosh I never looked at….

GO – while you’re thinking about that. Let me explain why I asked the question. In the RAE you can see the statistics across all the disciplines in the country, the ratio of graduate students per head of the academic staff is the highest in chemistry of all disciplines of all flavours right across the system. Now I would argue that that’s how chemistry is done right round the world. It would be valuable from the international review panel perspective to hear whether you think that’s an appropriate way to conduct 21st century chemistry.

MK – well certainly if I think of the places where I’ve worked, the organic groups have tended to be, you know, the goliaths, you know they need ten people to each make one little transformation down the line and crystallise it [laughter] and so in some sense if that’s distorting the statistics…I mean it would be interesting to know if the average size of a physical chemistry group is bigger than…I mean just to

24 calibrate, I have a group of 15 people, 17 maybe. It’s not considered giant…I mean some of my peer group have 40 in the US.

GO – but what about in comparison to somebody in maths?

MK – oh sure, but if I was a mathematician I would have long since given up being creative! Somehow a chemist doesn’t get creative usually until they’re in their middle age.

DD – Can I just comment because it’s a key point and I’ve tried to keep quiet because it’s Mike’s chance to explain to you and there’s a lot to follow on. The EPSRC is currently this year reviewing all of its training portfolio, last year it reviewed the research portfolio, so the whole question of the numbers of students of post docs and fellows across our portfolio is being reviewed and looked at by Council this October and will be making a decision. I do, what I want of course is more money, more funding, more of everything. If I don’t have more money then I have a grave concern that the RAE and its metrics have driven the increase in the numbers and I think we have moved to a more metric based REF. We are already hearing from universities that what they want is more numbers of students and therefore three year studentships, rather than a smaller number of five or six years which is what Mike has been talking about. We do have the possibility of HEFCE and the REF driving one direction and we are trying to drive quality research and training in another direction so we really do need to follow that up.

GO – the numbers don’t stack up. You have half as many people starting, staying twice as long, the number of PhD students in the building stays the same. There’s no necessity that the length of PhD study should change the statistics at all.

MK – that’s a point that we were making time and time again. If you’re in a steady state there’s no difference.

GO - yes.

MK- there’s going to be the same number of people on the seats. The ramp up might be different.

GO – my question was really about how to conduct the subject best. Is best practice as for example in the best US institutions done with small numbers of people, PhD students or large numbers? I would contend it’s done with lots of PhD students, chemistry is a discipline that needs them.

MK – well synthetic chemistry, I’m not sure it’s so true in physical chemistry.

Tom Welton, Imperial College

I’ve really got a plea for some change in clarification in the document itself. Today I got a real sense of how important the early career researchers were, the diversity issues were, but in the document there’s not prioritisation at all. You know I think there 40 something recommendations and there’s a real danger it could become a cherry pickers delight. You’re going to go home and then people are going to pick

25 the three or four they want to say were the important parts of this report. In order to avoid that, I think you should pick out what are the important parts of the report for you and the panel before you go and construct the report in that way, you know, if early career researchers are the important thing let it be the largest issue at the front of the document not starting on page whatever it is after we’ve waffled through in- organic, organic and physical ought to be doing. So I hope that that doesn’t sound like too much of a criticism, but it is a real plea to make sure that the report ends up saying and being used to say what you want it to say.

MK – so you’re right it’s recommendation E in the executive summary page 6, item one ‘nurturance support’. So you want the recommendations to come on the first page of the executive summary?

TW – I think the whole of the early career research and discussion should be the first thing that hits the substantial report as soon as you get through the executive summary…

MK – as I said when you get to recommendations, so again let’s be technical. We were hired to answer a set of framework questions, the logical way we did that was to just respond in terms of the framework, but I’m hearing what you’re saying and once we’d done with the framework, we had findings and then the number one recommendation is indeed that – if we can find a way of putting it earlier in the report I’m happy to do that.

TW – and they should be your priorities ….

MK – they are our priorities. There’s absolutely no mistake about that. It’s…we went around many times and the only email responses I got from my panel towards the closure of the report was to reaffirm the five bullets as priorities and the ranked order of them. Maybe they should be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, rather than just bullets.

TW – I just thought when I read the report, there’s no sense of priority at all.

JF – perhaps everything needs doing.

TW – well I mean that would make sense as well.

Tony Parker, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratories

I’m going to concentrate on the chemistry nano bio-med frontiers in particular. I’m charged to deliver chemistry if you cut me in half you will see chemistry written within me, but I’m poised to go into a multi-disciplinary research complex on the site itself, so what you’ve actually written here is a little bit negative it seems as if chemistry isn’t pushing as hard as it should be which I’ll take that up on board, but it’s a two way street, in my world I’ve always found this quite an uphill struggle to get into the medicine in particular for example. But is there advice you could give? You don’t actually develop this section is there something you feel in particular that we should be doing as a community?

26 MK – no I do have a response to that. So again I can tell you from my own experience this is…as in the case of crossing any two cultures, this is not something that happens instantaneously its something you have to work on. I know my collaboration with clinicians at the University of Pennsylvania hospital now go back 15 years and it probably took half of that time to speak somewhat common language.

It’s not appropriate for us to have joint students or post docs but nevertheless we influenced the kind of experiments they do, so we could talk about that offline. I would say that could be a subtheme, a subtopic that you should pull together. It just from a casual visit it would be inappropriate for me to speak publically about that. I’m happy to talk to you offline.

I mean it’s just an area that trying to think of you for the next decade and beyond this seems to me a wonderful area of opportunity to get what I like to call the nano-bio- med frontier and nanomedicine. I can’t tell you enough – the top guy in pulmonary medicine in Philadelphia came to see me and said ‘you know when I do an analysis on a cancer patient lung, I take a couple of kilograms, I mash it up and I try and get into the genomics there. How can we move into the nano area where I can just take a tiny little sample’. But it’s a communication issue right? Are you close to a hospital?

TP – well I work with hospitals, I’ve got a visiting chair in a hospital so I’m probably one of the successes but I’m…to be honest I don’t know how I’ve done it.

MK – so why don’t you ask the funding councils to convene a workshop on that to see if you can encourage some of the young career scientists, there’s opportunities out there.

Steve Caddick, UCL Chemistry

The first comment is on early career researchers, I know that your caveat is that it is the impression that you got. I’m afraid I don’t recognise that particular way of treating early career researchers either in chemistry or in other departments but I do accept that we can do more for support. But we’ve put hundreds of thousands of pounds into early career staff and we shouldn’t forget that the infrastructure that you were so quick to praise, also helps early career staff get their research up and running. That’s one point I’d like to make.

The second is on FEC and whether or not FEC is working and providing and the universities are providing infrastructure. Well, there is another component to this which is often funders, instead of funding 80% of FEC of a project, actually you try to leverage additional funding by asking for additional institutional support. And really that institutional support can only come from university funding. Now I know there is fund matching available etc, but nonetheless this actually erodes the entire principle of FEC so before we start to hammer our institutions too much for lack of investment and prolificacy we also need to recognise that part. And I know that’s a live issue at the moment.

27 And then finally, probably the most important point, and I’m sure you gave a lot of consideration to this, but your report is going to be incredibly important to our community its going to be read possibly by people who don’t know very much about chemistry and if they decide to take out of context page 46,

‘the view of the panel is that UK chemistry research community is perhaps overly dispersed across a rather large number of departments’

they may choose to misinterpret that in a way that wouldn’t be good for our community. I should just say that I’m particularly sensitive to this because my previous institution had a Nobel Prize in chemistry and less than 7 years later almost closed the department.

MK – yes it happens to be a personal friend of mine too so I’m well aware of that.

Look, we call the shots as we see it right? We came in, we had four days to travel around and that’s the impression we got, that…One of the factual statistics that we were shown is the gross funding into chemistry departments across the country. You have one department up here, the next one here and then you have like…there’s no dispersion across here. It just seems to me if plotting the funding projectory there’s going to be a second resurgence coming along, this long tail of institutions where you get a blur from whatever number it is 5 to number 25, with maybe 10% disparity, if somebody drops dead of a heart attack in this one they’ll move to 25 and this moves here how, are you going to sustain this huge number of university departments. It’s just casual…maybe I got it all wrong, I’m not an economist, I’m just looking at this and I’m saying this great long tail of well funded departments, is that sustainable when the net revenue is doing this…and then this perception that everyone of these fiefdoms has to have its 800megahurtz of MMR. I’m just on the outside I know it’s not sustainable where I live why should it be sustainable in a country where it’s fifth the size? Tell me, please.

SC – well that’s why the point made earlier on about involving HEFCE would be important because HEFCE over the last 5 or 6 years has been examining the viability and sustainability of chemistry departments and has decided to make a commitment as a permanent fixture in the HEFCE budget additional funding to support strategically vulnerable subjects. I’m not saying necessarily that we have to have this number of chemistry departments, but what I’m saying is that own admission, with an impression, you’re making a statement and its not necessarily the case that you have all of the information to feel that that’s robust and others that are less rigorous perhaps might take that out of context and we have had to work quite hard to sustain our chemistry community in the UK.

MK – oh I think you have done a fabulous job, I’m just asking you to think whether it’s sustainable going forward. I was charged to lead a committee to talk about the next 10 years and beyond and that’s just a flag that’s coming up to me, is this sustainable. Unless you plan…the thing is there to start thinking about the next 10 years if it involves HEFCE I never met anybody from HEFCE did I? I mean is that my fault? We were just charged to take a snapshot and this is the way we see it, if we got it wrong please email me and I’ll think about it…I keep saying me…it’s the committee that came to this conclusion, with some discussion.

28

SC – I’m just identifying the risk.

DD – I think it’s very worthwhile that the committee did identify the risks. It’s the job of HEFCE, of EPSRC and the Research Councils as a whole to… and discussions with universities, to address this, and we may find a way of working which mitigates the risks or we may find that the perceptions of Jim’s committee has come up with is correct, in which case in which case we would have to take some action, but it’s up to us to do that to respond either positively or negatively to the recommendation. I would not want the recommendation taken out at this point.

David Lennon, University of Glasgow

Relating to your recommendation section, I was actually following on from the first point, it’s a delight to see your appreciation of ISIS and how that fits it and I see we’ve had discussions here with an EPSRC environment. Somebody else that should probably be brought into the picture is STFC because it’s the sustainability of those, these institutions that we’ve built up within these last 10 years of growth that we would like to see developed and maintained. And I think its not just a role…there’s an interface between EPSRC and STFC and my feeling at the moment is STFC hurting to maintain that role…that’s part of the picture if that could be added into the discussion.

MK – so yes that’s really in the recommendation…why it made it to the…so it’s not just the big national facilities which are by and large the treasure. I mean the Diamond and ISIS really are great facilities but there are also another level regional facilities. So the plea is to think about ways of being able to sustain that or even make them more valuable.

DD – as you know we have got a review of medium scale facilities under way the consultation out at the moment – I think it closes today, so you’ve got about till midnight to…5.00pm to respond.

Vicky Jackson, BBSRC

So as a principal funder of biological chemistry and chemical biology we were very pleased to see these areas were highlighted in the review as a key strength. However, we were concerned by the statement in the review that communications between the research councils and the stakeholders is affecting the UK chemistry. I would like to hear a bit more about this please, if there are one or two key things that we could be doing, we’d like to hear this please, thank you.

MK - so the issue that came up time and time again on the visits was the relationship with the funding agencies and all sorts….I mean it’s discussed in the report as well but the key issues were the continual plea for not enough funding, for responsive mode, success rates were low, the nature of the peer review process. So the whole machinery of the funding mechanism was under attack, at least we bore the brunt of anger in the community and I did that in my opening remark when I said to quote Graham Fleming that ‘the councils and the community are married and divorce is not an option’. So if each side feels that there’s no problem .. the other side is angry you

29 have an awkward situation. I don’t know…I must say I had the feeling that the week I spent in the UK that I was becoming a psychologist and should probably bill both sides for the number of hours of sleep I lost trying to rationalise each sides position.

The plain fact is perhaps unreasonable expectations on the part of the community about the situation that we are all in and there’s probably equal guilt on the side of the people giving out the money…to go to an extreme that they’re giving out their money and you have to do what they say. So these are the two extreme poles right? And neither is correct, but somehow there has to be a dialogue and again you can quote me if you want…but there’s a perception that again, that some of the leaders of the community are not playing their full role in mediating this process. I’m not picking on the Royal Society of Chemistry or anything like that, I’m talking of the leaders of the discipline. I deliberately chose the example of documents that are prepared for the funding agencies in the US by the leaders of the chemical community, not just a bunch of random people that devote time. The leaders are participating in this dialogue. Perhaps if that happened here saner heads would prevail and things would work better. But maybe we got it wrong, maybe everything’s fine and when we flew by with this satellite view we got the wrong image...you know. It seemed to me it should be a clearer dialogue on both sides of what needs to be done.

JF – everybody in the room seems to have their hand up at various times [moves to next question]

Derek Woollins, EaStCHEM

OK can I just comment…I really liked the comments you made on multi-disciplinary work had made a step change and improvement and I think you understated that area of improvement in the UK. I look at the comments you made saying multi- disciplinary work I look at the department I’m in and the majority of people in East Chem are involved in at least one centre that’s not necessarily just chemistry, so it’s majority activity for the subject not a minority but I think that leads on….

MK interrupts – just a second, we were trying to average, we weren’t supposed to name places, I understand local sensitivity, but overall I still stand by that statement.

DW – well OK, I can only speak for the area I’m directly involved in obviously. What I also detected was, a criticism now, which was...I think the majority of our people, a group that found it very easy to be involved in multi-disciplinary activities are the physical chemists so I think you have actually overstated the difficulty in that area. From my perspective, physical chemists look well supported in the UK, now there may be physical chemists that will lynch me over lunch, that’s fine, but I don’t think you’ve got that completely right, I don’t think it’s as dramatic as you are describing it.

The other thing I’d say is you highlighted the collaboration between universities and where a good example of that, without being too local again, I don’t think EPSRC has got its relationships with multi university applications completely under control and there’s room for improvement there how we interact with EPSRC.

30 MK – thank you now, if we got it wrong, the physical chemistry, perhaps some other physical chemist could comment? Happy to take that out of the report but maybe….

DW – not physical chemists. I’m not a physical chemist so don’t …

MK – then maybe you should retract that remark. I wouldn’t dare speak for organic chemists.

Paul Seakins, University of Leeds

Post graduate tutor there. In the report you’ve said quite a lot, quite positively in general about the DTCs, doctoral training centres, so this is a question for you and both Professor Delpy, is to how you see the future of DTCs. Would you like to see more of them, are EPSRC going to fund more of them in the near future. It would certainly help us in our planning if we knew whether there were going to be more DTCs in the future, and also perhaps if you could say a little bit about the relationship. DTCs concentrate a lot of money in one area and inter-disciplinary areas, perhaps that may be to the detriment both financially and in terms of prestige of one or two people coming along working in particular groups, to individual PhD students.

MK – yes. So let me just answer quickly. We have the equivalent in the US and in other countries of these kind of central training ones…I would say this doesn’t inhibit individuals that want to do creative, adventurous work. Getting students supported by other grants and other mechanisms. Typically these kind of centre activities are, again speaking from my vantage point in North America, would be a small fraction of the total activity of the professor. So maybe one or two students out of 10, 20 would be doing this if you were involved in multiple centres, so I think what I liked about this activity is the dialogue it creates across different disciplines and this is very rewarding for the students, particularly if they go to the joint group meetings on systematic and regular basis where different participants expose the different research. So I think it’s a fantastic educational experience.

Should there be more of these? The impression I got going around there with the panel I guess there should be more of these but David should speak to that issue. I would say from perception again, is that they’re very successful and maybe there should be more but the details I think…

David Delpy

The Research Council is looking at the whole training issue. At the moment about 42 % of our post doctoral training goes into DTCs, so 57% goes to other resources but the majority through the doctoral training accounts. And we are looking at the DTCs. I would be loath, so this is personal, so this isn’t policy. This is not gospel, my impression is…I wouldn’t want to from EPSRC centrally, draft too much more of our funding into DTCs. There are some weaknesses in the DTCs, some gaps there are surprisingly few that are single discipline, I mean I am a great believer in multi- disciplinarity ….we got very few applications for core DTC physics or chemistry…

31 The other thing that I think is interesting is since we launched those DTCs we now have 7 or 8 or possibly more universities coming to us saying ‘can we use our DTA strategically to create our own DTCs’ and I think that’s very interesting example because that the is universities responding to their own local strategic needs rather than EPSRC centrally trying to hold a national competition and identify national strategic needs.

So, my gut feeling is there will be more DTCs, I suspect it’s not going to be a large amount driven centrally from EPSRC.

Duncan Thomas, University of Manchester

There’s been a lot of talk here in the discussion about co-ordination with UK stakeholders, but what about over the next 10 years, the UK chemistry community’s role in co-ordinating better with non-UK stakeholders? For instance, you mentioned internationally priorities and grand challenges are available, they’re available in Europe, there’s issues there with the European Research Council, ERAnet and so on, and mobility of early career researchers and mechanisms where the EPSRC and others are involved in funding co-ordination. Is that going to get more important over the next 10 years or less important, just so that you know the UK doesn’t become too preocal in just wondering what the stakeholders here are going to do.

MK – well I don’t have a crystal ball, but if the European Science Foundation continues to grow in importance, then you would be stupid to ignore that. But all the signs are that the people in the UK are at least as aggressive as other members of the EU in getting these funds. I think it would be a great development for Europe if extra funds go into research no matter where and so you should pay attention to that opportunity. But that wasn’t part of our charter, we were asked to look at the UK.

As I said the surprise to most people is that very few, if any people, talked about a link with the US, so maybe already this has happened, this transition as far as people here are concerned the US is unimportant.

Lesley Yellowlees, EaStCHEM

I’d just like to say thank you for highlighting pooling for us and particularly the nurturing of pooling which I think will be an interesting development that we have to continue onwards. But going away from that I think you talked a lot about infrastructure and equipment and whether it be large bits of kit or small bits of kit. You mentioned briefly in the report about technical support to run that kit and I think to me that’s one thing I would like to have seen more highlighted because I think it’s a problem for us at universities how we having got the kit and having worked hard to get the kit, how we manage to keep it running and performing at the top end. Not only for the researchers but also for the PhD students and for everybody, we need good technical support and that’s a crucial problem at the moment in the UK.

I’d also like to say about the fellowships. I think that you highlight, there’s a whole peripheral of fellowships mentioned here between 2 and 10 years and I think we have a problem there. However, I wouldn’t like to see happen in this that the high quality, high end fellowships that have great prestigious associated with them from

32 the Royal Society, EPSRC etc the research council ones, I wouldn’t like to see them denigrated because of that. Because I think we all know from the universities that we have got some of the high calibre staff coming through that fellowship route and I wouldn’t like to see the top end of those fellowships lost in all this. I can see some of the bottom end ones we could perhaps loose, but not the top end ones.

And finally I would just like to say it’s beholden on us all here to.. I think you highlight the communication issue we have… and I think it’s beholden to us all to buy into that. I don’t think we can all stand back and say ’it’s up to them’, it’s not it’s up to all of us and all of us to take that forward.

Carole Perry, Nottingham Trent University

Before I put my question, I would just like to say that half of my group is actually funded by American money, so I have funding from NIH and American Airforce, so there are places that do get money from the States.

My question is about, my comment is about, that fact that you talked about the fact that there is good diversity amongst the early career researchers, but that that it is lost later on, and as one of the few female professors in the UK I would say that I would like your committee’s comments on, or perhaps thoughts on, how we might actually improve the matter because obviously its not good to have an environment where you’re missing in terms of…if it’s not females…I’m thinking more in terms of the other ethnic communities being represented as well and I know that in the US this is much better, a much fairer representation in terms of staffing through the universities. I think this is something we haven’t discussed today.

MK – so having had two daughters and one of which was a mathematician when she was young and went to university when she was still in short pants and after a semester decided that mathematics was for men and so she went into computer science. So I've been sensitised to that issue for many, many years and it’s a hard slog, my own institute has over 17 years evolved the percentage of females from 3 to 20 and when I started at 3 the national representation in material science was 10%. But it’s a moving stick so after 17 years I’ve got to the national average. So this is a battle, its a long haul and its going to take a long time but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t begin.

When you talk of other ethnic diversities, the US is a special case. This is not a problem, we have every single race on the planet so that’s not an issue. Even in my group with 15 post docs it’s not a problem, we have I think there’s 12 nationalities, so it’s just not an issue. It may be helped by the ability to recruit foreign graduate students, that’s one of the things we highlight. We know in Scotland they seemed to have been able to get around this, but it seems to me this is a missed opportunity. But it’s not for to speak on the mechanisms you need…this is highlighted by a number of places but the problem is us…how do we do that as a collective community from the grass roots all the way through.

CP – so you’re suggestion about the…in terms of foreign graduate students its very well if we have out own money to fully fund our studentships but where universities rely upon DTCs and DTAs for example and EPSRC money, the students if they want

33 to receive their bursary and their fees they have to come from the UK. So it’s difficult sometimes to fund an overseas student, even European students, so the suggestions you made in terms of looking at our pool for graduate students and it maybe we as a community have to think about how we best fund these students to try and get a more diverse group. We all have students from abroad if we have funding that is not attached to a UK grant giving body but it’s something I think that as a community we could do better.

JF - may I comment on that. But in fact, we can have overseas students, I mean EPSRC might be attached to a grant and EPSRC funds only about 30-40% of studentships, so the other resources can be used to fund overseas students, but I accept there is a problem.

Michael Ward, University of Sheffield

Your comments about providing start up facilities, to early career students hit it squarely on the head there. There’s a remarkable disparity between the different mechanisms by which people start their careers, on the one hand, if they’re fortunate enough to get a fellowship after a competitive peer review process, they’re very well off but there’s no guarantee of a permanent job at the end of it, conversely if someone is appointed directly to a lectureship, start up funds for those people usually have to come from the department. The amount of money I have available on an annual basis to support members of staff, despite the fact that the department has a turnover of £8m, the money I can spend on people is about £50,000 …it’s tiny.

So we have people that have been through a peer review process, but it’s just as rigorous to get a lectureship. Last time we made an appointment it was to the best of 60 applicants and that’s a lower success rate than EPSRC fellowship. But what we can give them to get going is absolutely peanuts in compared to the people that go through the fellowship route. And really this is to echo a point that Paula Bryan made earlier, there must be some scope for rationalisation between the facilities, that the embarrassment of riches on one hand for people that have fixed term contracts and the scarcity of facilities on the other hand for people that have permanent contracts. There must be some way of doing this better.

MK – yes, so in effect this was clear to us on the panel, there were some places where mentoring of young people was fine and there was even half decent start ups lets say, but overall it was not good and just as you’ve highlighted. It’s a challenge even in the US that start up money is typically not from a grant, it’s a challenge, it has to be generated internally whether its taxing your colleagues in one form or another, it’s a tax if you have got departmental money and you’re going to take some of it here and use it to hire new faculties so the department has to buy into this in some way or other. But I do think, and the panel was totally on board with this that, in general, maybe we got it wrong, but in general there is insufficient money for these people starting off. So if it isn’t possible through the department then there must be other ways to solve this. Can it be solved through charities, can it be solved through the Royal Society, we can go on and on, it’s for you guys as a community to address this. It’s an important problem. The gentleman from University College got up in a huff and left because he says it isn’t a problem at University College. But Ok, but if I got it wrong in the rest, maybe it’s not a problem in Edinburgh. I mean, maybe it’s not

34 a problem at University College maybe it’s well run, but overall it’s a problem. Otherwise a lot of people are wasting my time, it’s a problem.

Robin Bedford, University of Bristol

Going back to the topic of DTCs, you highlighted synthesis DTCs which we were fortunate enough to get at Bristol as a good example of use of DTCs there are a lot of multi-disciplinary DTCs put in place and David Delpy was commenting earlier on that he was surprised at the lack of non-multidisciplinary DTCs. That’s not a surprise. Let me clarify this point, we were told in no uncertain terms when the DTCs were introduced, that they would not countenance, Neil Viner’s exact words were: ‘he would not countenance funding single application DTCs’. Absolutely no way would they fund a DTC in chemical synthesis for instance. So, it seems this position has changed slightly with the use of DTCs and its interesting you’ve highlighted a synthesis as a good application for a DTC and you may want to build upon that as an appropriate use of DTCs. Maybe sometimes it’s sensible to go for a collaborative DTC, multi-disciplinary, maybe in other instances physical organic chemistry for instance. It may be more sensible to be focussed on a more particular discipline.

MK – yes and again, beating up on Dave Delpy is not helpful. I think it’s for the community to generate spontaneously exciting proposals that can persuade their peer group that this is where money should be invested. I think that’s the fairest way to deal with that. Obviously the core of chemistry is synthesis, I don’t care which way you cut it. Chemists make things, they break bonds, some of us characterise things, but I think we are secondary to people that make new muck, so to have a DTC in synthesis is fine with me, I’d be a bit upset if it was just synthesising new products, but that’s a personal view not a panel view.

David Harrowven, University of Southampton

You talked a lot about early career researchers and I support everything that you say there, but actually when I was an early career researcher I was forewarned that mid career research was the most difficult part for an academic. I just wonder, very little was said, you mention about how we have lots of eminent people retiring and that there is a nucleus of good people coming through but how do we actually make sure that at the end of an early career research period they don’t fall off the end and have nothing available to them, or they’re in competition with the galacticos and therefore have no funding opportunities.

MK – that’s a good point. Sabbaticals were invented to deal with that. I think when we reach mid career they call it a crisis for well defined terms, you have to decide whether the years you’ve spent have been the most profitable or should I take a sabbatical in the great lab somewhere and retool myself. I personally have found it rewarding to change the pitch and direction of what I’ve done about every decade. Maybe the pressures to do that are less in you’re end in Europe and the UK.

Mid careers a difficult time in many ways. Indeed you’re in the transition to just being a very good practitioner or perhaps been bought by Real Madrid, so, except in chemistry you’re typically 40-45 years old when that happens. So it’s usually pretty evident who the people on the fast track are because it’s not like mathematics you

35 produce one paper when you’re 18. I mean there is a legacy...so chemistry is different in that sense but we didn’t say much about it? Well I think it was striking to the panel because it appears there that a lot of places and it was highlighted in overview talks that the peak of their age distribution is around 40-45, so they have 20-25 years ahead of them. If these huge numbers of recruits into these departments had been the wrong choices you’re heading for a train wreck in 20 years time. So maybe a lot of people should be on sabbatical.

Peter Sadler, Head of Warwick Chemistry

Just to echo everybody’s thanks to you and your committee for all your hard work. A couple of points and then a question.

Firstly, if we have to consolidate because of lack of funds, I think our plea would be that no chemistry department is actually shut down. It seems to me the strength of the American system is that there are good undergraduate colleges that keep everybody else on their toes and they’re doing internationally competitive research.

Second point, I hope your recommendation was that of Graham Fleming that the bizarre behaviour of some of our panels be rectified. We’ve been through situations where we’re not allowed the names of panellists until after they’ve met, were not allowed to speak to the chairman of the panel and I think that you wouldn’t need this ‘three strikes and you’re out’ at all if these people are putting in all these application to speak to the chairman of the panel and that academic will tell them straight what to do to get a better application or whatever and we wouldn’t need all this talk about three strikes and your out.

MK – so the only agency I’m aware of in the US gives that kind of feedback loop is the NIH but the if you wrote a proposal and it went down in flames in the first time, you got three pages of comments, when you resubmitted it, it does have a tag on it to tell the reviewers its gone down once then you used to be able to get a third strike. Just under the burden of community pressure, they’ve now stopped the third cycle. That was very good for young people to have this continual feedback so what they’ve gone to is a different system now, you get just a second chance and that’s out, and they’ve just decided to take the pool of researchers in their first ten years post PhD, and treat them as a separate pool from the rest, and the aim is for them to roughly have them as I understand it the same success rate as the rest. So they’re in competition with themselves they’re going to make sure they don’t kill their young. Cannibalism.

PS – finally the question. If all of your recommendations are implemented, and if everything else was equal, would you bring your group back to the UK to do research, and if not are there other factors apart from everything in here that would be holding you back?

MK- well I did go through that, just to be personal for a minute, off the record, I did go that exercise of perhaps coming back here about 15 years ago and one of the most telling questions to me was from…when I went to see the HR people and they said to me are you going to go back to the US when you retire? So what was the point of coming if the administration of the university was already planning my retreat! The

36 second thing was they thought I’d come in and be an administrator, we’ll give you 5 years to get set up and your group then you can be head of department, there were sort of boundary conditions like this that just didn’t seem attractive and never mind the enthusiasm from people here. And the final point was that the department where I’ve been for the last 22 years is literally across the road from the hospital so actually the people I work with in anaesthesiology and so on are closer to me than physics, literally across the road, go in, turn right to the main entrance to the hospital, get the elevator to the 5th floor and there I am with my friends in clinical anaesthesiology. So if you could reproduce that 15 years ago in the UK I might be here. That’s where I saw the future and I don’t think I was wrong.

JF – and I’ll apologise to the people in advance that are not going to have time to ask a question, but there will be a chance to ask questions over lunch. I do apologise but we’re on the last two questions now.

Brian Cox, Novartis UK

I was just interested in your comment about strategic consolidation, what did the panel mean about that, was it referring perhaps to the multiple funding bodies, other stakeholders or was it actually and/or the universities suggesting consolidation now .. I guess this is coming from someone whose…

MK – [cuts in] well it was mainly thinking from the perspective of the universities but, and we heard from Dave Delpy that there is already joint funding within the set of councils if I’m correct of strategic areas and I think that that is an area that chemistry in particular will benefit from, it crosses so many areas. The other issue was for the community to come to grips with this business of drug discovery and we saw great examples of spin outs and we saw excellent examples of the bigger industries working with universities and one place we visited people were worried that per capita, these big corporations were investing much more in the US than they were in the UK. Now this was just one statement from one person and maybe correct, but given the historical importance of drug discovery to the economy in the UK and to the world at large, this is perhaps an area that’s worth some attention. Maybe it’s getting it and we just don’t know about it.

BC – I guess my question was because I myself have spent my career being forcefully consolidated, so I think it’s a very good point that you make, for people to actually consider that as an option, no matter how distasteful it is, because it’s best to be consolidated by your own method rather than someone forcing you to do it by attrition, so you know, definitely agree with that.

Richard Pike, Royal Society of Chemistry

I was struck by your comment that in your travels you had not seen much energy research and I wondered whether you could put your finger on why it is that the chemistry community does not seem to have embraced energy, even though it’s a major sector, obviously for the future.

MK – so the one exception was a presentation in which in some sense could be called a lecture in chemistry it could have been directed at fuel cells or something

37 like that. It doesn’t mean it was the only thing, but it was the only example that was highlighted. I was surprised, I thought I’d see more in the casual cross section of exciting work going on, particularly because you have corporations like BP here that we know, at least according to the TV, is very interested in alternative energies sources. Chemists have an enormous role to play there and you probably know better than me, and so I was just again surprised. Maybe it’s going on and we missed it. Tell us if we got it wrong.

RP - If I could just make a comment Mike, my view is that energy almost by definition is involving multi-disciplinary work.

MK – yes

RP – and often will involve engagement across a wide range of activities and engagement with industry to some extent. Just in my own travels I get the feeling that it is almost too difficult or unusual set of circumstances for a small group, or even a large group of chemists to address and they seem to be put off by it. I guess my point of view, representing the RSC is, it’s a question of trying to sell the subject sell the top pick more effectively and present the opportunities. One of our themes or mantras is to say that the chemists who can develop artificial synthesis, or other techniques like that they will be the Bill Gates of the future. They will win or earn millions, we need to convey that throughout the entire educational supply chain, from schools into industry and on the way through to universities.

JF – so, on that note for the Bill Gates’ of the future, Mike, I’ll draw the questions to a close unless you’re burning to respond to that, Mike, I think that your throat must be burning by now?

MK - yes it is dry. I wanted just to say one thing there in the report we give a - reference to something that came up while we were on the panel, where something done by the National, no it was in Business Week, there was meeting in Atlanta at Georgia Tech where a bunch of kids were asked about whether they were interested in science, and they were not interested in science very much. They took this survey and then they had presentations on climate change, on the energy problem and then asked these kids would you be interested to solve these problems? Seven out of the 10 kids said ‘yes’. So trying to tell high school kids they should study chemistry and physics is not to be the right message. This is just one anecdotal story, so thanks.

JF – nice one to finish on. First of all let me apologise to all those that didn’t have time to ask their questions. Please join us for lunch. This community, which we are a cross section of, has a lot to thank Mike and his panel for, in raising a lot of questions that need to be sorted out. It’s not just this community as has been mentioned it’s Funding Councils, Research Councils, Government, Vice Chancellors and so on. It’s the whole body that needs to be involved in the debate, which will hopefully lead to a change. Nice phrase, but it’s time we did change. I’d like to thank everybody that asked questions or made comments and I’d particularly like to thank Mike and all his panel for the excellent job they’ve done on our behalf.

38 Andrew Bourne – next steps

I just wanted to think through what is going to happen now with this report, so as Mike has indicated, I think any points or clarifications should be sent to Mike pretty quickly he turns round things very quickly, he doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet so if I could just encourage people to do it by next Friday at the latest to get their comments back to Mike if they want to add anything, and I'm sure he’ll consider that and what we really want to do then is thinking about taking that forward.

So as the formal kind of response I guess as commissioning an agency for this report, we will respond to the panel report with its recommendations so I guess were hoping that the formal report will be published with any changes during July. During July it is also going to go to the July Council of EPSRC for discussion and also my Physical Sciences Strategic Advisory Team in July as well for discussion. And then we really will get on with the business of developing an action plan and I think hopefully you will see the progress from the 2002 report from ‘Whitesides’, that the action plan played a very key role in actually taking forward these recommendations.

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