Science funding in Australia is mortally wounded! | Leanna Read | TEDxFlindersUniversity
[Music] [Music] [Applause] thank you Rob and thank you for the opportunity to talk here and the term science funding Australia is mortally wounded might be a slight exaggeration but I think it's got a severe case of arthritis if nothing else now and I think that applies across the system uh be it in Industry uh the way that we fund research there uh government agencies the death by a Thousand Cuts that csro is facing for example but I'm going to focus in this brief talk on the University sector and uh again there are a variety of issues but I want to focus on what I think are the two biggies so problem number one is the fact that the system is really unsustainably competitive these days and I'm sure a number of you in the audience have a very firsthand experience of this and the reason is quite simple uh the numbers of application here I'm showing nh& MRC project Grant applications but I could show you a number of equivalents for other programs the numbers of applications over the last 5 years or so have been increasing quite dramatically uh the funding has not so of course it doesn't take too much complex maths to work out the fact that the success rate is dropping quite substantially so we're down now to a a dismal 15% success rate and that's not just in this program so if you look across a range of the NH and MRC programs be they the grants which I've just shown you or career fellowships uh early or mid uh gain 15 14% success rates Arc is a bit better but uh you wouldn't write home and uh in congratulations about that so the discovery grants about 20% and the fellowships again a bit below that so this is a system which is not sustain in its current form it's demoralizing for people having to apply for these grants and and and uh many of the grants are classed as uh clearly fundable but they haven't got the funds to do it so uh it's unproductive for people to spend all their time doing this and it's difficult for early career researchers how do you establish yourself in the system uh those of us somewhat older than that can probably remember the very first grant we got a small Grant from a small Foundation but boy it gave you a confidence and put you on the way that's tough to get these days the second problem uh is a bottomup approach I call it uh and that is that uh we uh think of ourselves as more in individual research projects than in solving big problems for the world so you know we've all got our pet areas of research and we say GE I want to do a project on this it's pretty exciting science I'm going to do it and by the way the end application one day will be but it's not done in any kind of coordinated uh fashion in getting scale which is necessary if you're really going to address a big issue in the world or the end user engagement so it's driven from the bottom up as opposed to the one who's ultimately going to have to put this into practice uh how what what do they need and these are some statistics that back that up if you look at the total funding in Arc and uh nhmc uh about 20% of it goes to the what you call the program center Grants uh that is the rest of it is more the smaller projects and of course people uh funding as well and in the linkages with industry uh linkage grants or development grants for NH and MRC it's only 6% of the funding and so you're getting very very very few uh applications coming through in that area one of the flagship programs that's in this area the C program has a a budget which is significant but it's only 10% of that total Arc nhmrc equivalent so what's the solution enough about problem s uh I think there's a there's a number of things we could do the one what we're not going to do have I would predict unfortunately is more nhmc a funding in the system this is a trend over time it hasn't changed much over the last few years and with the economic situation the way it is now I can't see that changing so I wouldn't sort of sit back and say well maybe they'll improve that system the first solution I would suggest is that we do need to focus our research more and effort more into outcome driven multidisiplinary collaboration that really brings scale to the system and I will uh blatant self-interest here show you uh as an example of this the cic that I chair s therapy manufacturing headquartered in Adelaide and that's focusing on Technologies to grow and expand cells to be used in therapeutic purposes so it's not focusing on the biology or the science behind the cells themselves but it's addressing what is is a key growing problem in this industry and it's an anent industry which is set to explode maybe become the next uh big area of medicine and that is that how do you grow these CS how do you in a way that would make them coste effective for normal uh application in medicine now in doing this what the CC said was well we need a whole range of expertise it goes from surface technology science through to scale up uh type uh expansion of those resources uh clean room facilities preclinical animal expertise clinical expertise regulatory um understanding and in particular at the top of that diagram enduser involvement so we are driven by experiments that relate to the end user and I asked someone the other day who was working in one of the projects in the cic and very closely with an end user a company and he was working on four particular challenges and I said well if if you didn't have that industry partner working hand inand with you from the start of this project would would you have ch chosen those projects those particular key challenges he said probably about half of them so that is half of what he would be doing would be out of the context of the uh needs of the industry partner in the ultimate application and perhaps still might be useful but but there's a reasonable chance would would not be successful in terms of solving the problem so that's the kind of thing I think more and more we're in a world competitive situation we have to focus on the second one and you've all seen this slide I'm sure is to improve linkages with industry nhm AIC is not the only source of funding it's not going to increase in future we need to diversify our industry sources into universities and Industry is an obvious uh case example and they're much more enduser focused to boot so here here we are Australia at the bottom of the pack in terms of its uh relationship and collaboration between universities and companies and if you the trouble is we have in our sector 7 % of our researchers are in the University sector only 30% in companies so if these two uh sectors don't get together we're in the proverbial so the third solution I think going on from that is to prepare more of our graduates to go into that industry sector so that we can address this issue uh of only having a minor proportion of our researchers in that sector and I might add too in terms of granting I'm I'm gave you those very pessimistic projections but if you were to go for an arc uh linkage Grant the success rate is 36% so you know it's it's a pretty simple equation why not go for linkage grants and work with industry so there's a range of things we could do with our graduates entrepreneurship training um exchange of staff and so forth that you can see there and we haven't got time to go into so I think those are the three issues I think that uh that that we need to do more scale in effort of what we do better industry linkages and better training for our graduates uh right down preferably to Primary School to be honest but that's Martin's problem and he will address that subsequently uh certainly in our University uh degrees and why is this important and I think this graph to me uh says it all Australia is a Commodities resources export focused Nation 60% or so of our exports are in the resources sector that was fine while we had a nice booming uh resources sector we haven't anymore hopefully it'll come back but I think it has opened everyone's eyes to the fact that this country needs to diversify its industry base and its economy and that's got to be in some of these other sectors that are there and the way forward is clearly related to Innovation and therefore the linkages between universities and getting that technology out into that sector building our economy for Australia's future is the absolute crucial way to go thank you [Music] [Applause]