The last week has seen the outcome of the recent UK government spending review trickle down through all the levels of the science funding structure. From the STFC council came a headline announcement for many doing "curiosity-driven" research in Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, and Astronomy: That there will be a ~30% reduction in the budget for such activities, at least in the grant lines that have traditionally funded them. This is obviously unwelcome news to all of us in any of these communities, worried as we are about our own jobs, current and future jobs for the young researchers we are teaching or mentoring, and for the international standing of the UK in international projects and collaborations.
The news coverage has generally focussed on the potential negative results of these cuts. Here's an example from the American Science Magazine.
Ian Chapman, the head of UK Research and Innovation – UKRI – which is the umbrella organisation at the top of all government funding councils, today wrote an open letter giving some more context about the decisions across all funding councils. It attempts to place the details of the STFC council outcomes in a wider context of directions from the goverment, as well as the international situation with large-scale facility support in the STFC budget. There is mention of "doing fewer things better", which has felt like a mantra for the whole 30 years I have been working in science research in the UK, and has felt at my least cynical that it is the UK managing its relative decline in standing in the world, and at my most that it is due to the lobbying of large groups and/or large universities to grab money for themselves. Some useful context in Chapman's letter implied that even with fixed or modest increases of funding, emerging areas (such as AI) crowd out older fields in their demand for a share of funding, and cross the research council remits so that new funding calls are less likely to sit in single-council traditional grant rounds. None of that sounds obviously unreasonable to me, and I'm not at all wedded to the idea that we should carry on at all times doing things the same way we have always done. Whether reasonable support and opportunities will be given to researchers to move into new areas by funders and employers will be key here. I don't mind well-managed change, though bonkers tech-bro break-things-and-see-what-happens is something I am wary of, as it is popular with some in power.
Nuclear physics, as ever in my time in the UK, sits in an uneasy place. The more "fundamental" physics bits of the nuclear world (as opposed to e.g. nuclear engineering or applications in radiation protection or medicine) moved away from the EPSRC council many years ago, with the general consent of the nuclear physics commnunity, into the newly-formed STFC. Here, it was hoped, the lack of immediate application which had made us the poor relations of EPSRC, would be no issue. In the end, I think the nuclear physics community has felt like the poor relation in STFC which you can often hear described as the particle and astro council, forgetting the tiny nuclear component. We have gone from being the least applied field in EPSRC to the most applied in STFC. But thanks to the applications of nuclear physics, we have some hope. For example, this coming week we're expecting the announcement of the funding of Nuclear Skills Doctoral Focal Awards (to train new PhD students). We (the "blue skies" nuclear physics community) have joined this call eagerly, knowing we are well-placed to provide skills for the wide nuclear industry, and because of things like this, I am not as pessimistic as I might have been in the past at the raw 30% headline announcement of a cut. By itself, an increase in student numbers alongside a decrease in research jobs for the students to go into is not where all of us want to be, but as someone who has been able to access cross-field nuclear/quantum research job funding, I have to remain cautiously optimistic that such opportunities to break out of our traditional path will become increasingly more available to us.
As usual, I want to include a picture on each blog post. I'm not sure what fits here best, so here's a direct link to the picture UKRI used on the open letter from Ian Chapman. The URL gives the file title as UKRI-010226-Stock_abstract-rectangular-metal-tiling-building-facade_Unsplash.jpg so I guess that's what it is
