Comments on: Dinner at St Trinneans with EPSRC

By: Michael Merrifield

Michael Merrifield — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:57:38 +0000

“As we know from the current situation at the STFC,
the nature of the council is such that if you have any
gains or losses they get concentrated in the bits of
flexible money they have,” says Peter Main director of
science and education at the Institute of Physics. “This
is generally the money they supply to people to exploit
facilities—the money given to do research”

But only if you insist on keeping them under the same budget holder…

By: Alan Heavens

Alan Heavens — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:15:07 +0000

The mother of a friend of mine attended St Trinneans. Apparently the people in charge weren’t in control and the underlings were rebellious. Good to see some things don’t change – historical continuity and all that. Not that I’m commenting on your own School, of course.

By: Dave Carter

Dave Carter — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:55:56 +0000

Ok Mike, its good to hear your experience here. I can see both sides of this.

By: Michael Merrifield

Michael Merrifield — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:00:55 +0000

Dave — Do I gather that you would like funding for instrumentation also to be moved away from the body that operates the facilities? While that would certainly address your concern by putting these potentially-conflicting interests at arm’s length, I suspect that it would cause more problems than it solved, by creating such a strong division between a telescope and its instruments. My view would be that the way to deal with this potential conflict is by having the rights checks and balances within the funding agency to ensure fair competition when such competition is desirable. Certainly my experience with the ELT Steering Committee has been that, with appropriate management, it is quite possible to have constructive collaboration as well as healthy competition between university groups and STFC establishments even though the funding is all channelled through STFC.

By: Dave Carter

Dave Carter — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:45:12 +0000

Mike, do you think that is appropriate that University groups which develop instruments, and in a couple of cases to operate facilities, should have to bid for funds to the same body which owns and operates facilities which could be seen as competing, either for users or for contracts?

By: Michael Merrifield

Michael Merrifield — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:54:18 +0000

I have had an interesting chat with some particle physicists, who are of the opinion that one could probably divide their instrument development funding from their exploitation funding, in much the same way that groups involved in both sides of astronomy could divide their support.

As discussed earlier, such a division is not perfect, but it is surely more optimum than the current arrangements as long as appropriate higher-level strategic bodies are in place to mitigate the risk of any mismatch between instrument development and exploitation needs.

By: Paul Crowther

Paul Crowther — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:33:46 +0000

According to my spies in STFC land, the 25% cut in astro grants from circa 330 to 250 over CSR07 relates just to “responsive” (standard + roller) grants, and excludes project-based staff (“instruments” etc), which were unofficially guessed to be 30-40. I based my argument upon these guestimates.

If most post-docs were actually employed to do project stuff, there wouldn’t be much exploitation going on, which would strike me as pretty odd. The 2008-11 STFC Delivery Plan highlighted a 44% increase in research output from the astro community in 2006/07, which coincided with increased PDRA support for exploitation in recent years from AGP, which is now set to take a dramatic downturn.

By: Paul Crowther

Paul Crowther — Mon, 19 May 2008 10:57:49 +0000

By: andyxl

andyxl — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:04:26 +0000

Paul – I doubt if its true that “astro grants are mostly exploitation in nature” … a large fraction of the funding to University groups is concerned with building instruments, data archives, post launch support, operating eMerlin, etc. (Would be interesting to see the ratio.) However, for astronomy the “build and operate” grants are fairly distinct from the “exploitation” grants, whereas for PP everything is routed through the group rolling grants; so for us it should be possible to decouple whereas for PP it is very hard.

By: Paul Crowther

Paul Crowther — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:14:19 +0000

Aside from theory, astro grants are largely observational (exploitation) in nature, and so inherently responsive in nature. Aside from instrumentation groups, these are intrinsically much closer to EPSRC’s approach than the large, long-term rollers of particle physics.

The 40% shift towards bids for astro rollers at the last round in 2007 did not occur because groups magically became more coherent or long term in nature, but because all the signs from STFC (many guidelines inherited from PPARC) seemed to be pushing groups down this route – as the numbers below illustrate, its much harder to get a “fundable” grant actually funded, if it enters the system as a standard grant.

The cut to the volume of STFC grants has been especially ill-timed for those submitting rollers in 2007, since the actual PDRA numbers awarded by AGP hardly provided the much needed “stability”. Indeed, many rollers were ultimately converted to standard grants (by AGP or PI’s), as these vital statistics illustrate:

Astro rollers: 87.5 fundable, 63.7 awarded, subsequently reduced to 53.6 PDRAs

Astro standard: 42.2 fundable, 19.4 awarded, subsequently increased to 29.5 PDRAs

Putting the prestige of a large roller aside, I suspect many of us would prefer EPSRC’s genuinely responsive process of applying for standard grants to the options presently available in STFC, even putting their respective grant reductions over CSR07 aside (3% at EPSRC; 25% at STFC).