Funding reforms could impact UK physicists’ collaborations at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory.Credit: CERN
The United Kingdom’s researchers are an under-used asset “that we need to sweat” to boost economic growth, according to the head of the country’s largest funding agency.
Speaking at a parliamentary committee hearing in London on Tuesday, Ian Chapman, a physicist who leads UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), said that the high quality of the United Kingdom’s research and innovation base is its only competitive advantage over rival nations.
UKRI is the United Kingdom’s national funding agency for research and innovation, and has distributed about £9 billion (US$12 billion) of public money in the current financial year. Chapman said that UKRI needs major reform to convert expertise into ideas and companies that could create jobs and money for the UK economy. “It is latent at the moment. I think it’s under-exploited.”
However, media reports suggest that the reforms could drain university science of funds and put the nation’s participation in major international science projects in jeopardy, and have provoked concern and anxiety among researchers.
“This will hurt the UK research community very badly,” says Lucien Heurtier, a postdoctoral researcher in physics at King’s College London. He is organizing an open letter from postdocs and postgraduate students to make that point to Chapman, which he expects to publish later this week.
The reforms could leave large-scale physics infrastructure projects facing funding uncertainty. Those projects include an experiment called the LHCb, run using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland.
“If the UK pulls out of these massive projects, it’s not clear that they will go ahead. It will have an international impact,” agrees Maggie Lieu, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Funding crisis
Three actions taken by UKRI have caused particular concern. First, of the nine research councils and other bodies that make up UKRI, three — the major funders of work in the medical, biological and physical sciences — have announced that they are temporarily blocking some grant applications. Second, another of the nine, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), has said it will cease or reduce investments in existing physics and astronomy projects. And third, researchers expecting money directly from the UKRI infrastructure fund have been told they have been de-prioritized.
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