Town Meeting Transcript
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
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. 2 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.