Dean's message
10 Jun 2019
Update from Graham Lord
Dear Colleagues
Although I didn’t take up the role of Dean until earlier this year, we’re actually towards the end of the third year of operation as the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health and over the last three months we’ve refreshed our leadership team - an effective mix of new and more established team members. The University’s Board of Governors asked me to update them on our direction of travel a couple of weeks ago and this was also the focus for the Faculty Town Hall meeting last Thursday.
I’ve mentioned before that our business model is based on the ‘virtuous circle’ effect of quality research and education outputs that drive the Faculty’s performance, that influence the ability to attract top staff and high-quality students, as well as contributing to the overall research environment.
Whilst this is the same fundamental model as is found in the other Faculties, it differs in FBMH in that the proportion of income derived from research grants and contracts is higher. This arises partly from the much higher opportunity, and need, for us to interact with organisations outside of the traditional University funding bodies - the Office for Students, Research England and the Research Councils that now sit under the umbrella of UKRI (UK Research and Innovation).
The Faculty also partners with a number of large prestigious charities and foundations, including Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the British Heart Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The financial consequence of this high level of interaction with the NHS Trusts and charities is that the Faculty has the ability to grow research income from sources not open to the other Faculties. However, this means that a large part of our research income doesn’t contribute to the overheads of the Faculty in the same way as, say, grants from the Research Councils.
The Faculty also has a number of big undergraduate programmes for which student intakes are capped or highly regulated by the NHS and other professional bodies. In many cases, this applies equally to the recruitment of international students as Home/EU students, and, as a consequence, FBMH currently has the lowest level of international tuition fee income.
These characteristics result in the Faculty making the lowest financial contribution to the University among the three Faculties, and so you can understand why our financial health is a constant challenge. I want us to develop a business model that will include some diversification, for example by commercialising certain facilities to maximise spare capacity where they are currently under-utilised and also by ensuring that any new facilities that we set up are sustainable in the medium to long-term.
As you know, we’re considering the overall performance of the Faculty and its optimal future size and shape as part of the 10-year strategy development work that will be shared with you for discussion later this year. Among the issues we find, when looking at the performance of our Schools and the Divisions within them, are some significant variations in terms of research income, staff to PGR student ratio, and teaching contribution - all of which needs to be addressed. We’ve identified a small number of areas of our activity that we will need to review, and other areas where our research efforts can be merged, focused or may be better delivered through NHS initiatives.
In terms of research performance, the review of the Research Domains is enabling the FLT to identify high priority areas where succession planning, leadership and investment will be needed. We’ll invest in priority areas but this first requires careful planning with the Faculty’s research community, a sound financial plan, and a clear line of sight to impact, which, in turn will support the forthcoming REF (Research Excellence Framework).
At the Town Hall, I also talked about our business income which consistently contributes to more than 50% of the total for the University and has maintained a high level of funding and partnerships over the last three years. As industry income continues to grow, FBMH will continue to be a significant contributor to growth across the University.
The more involved academic colleagues are able to be in business development and commercialisation, at home and internationally, the better. Academics often have the best contacts and understanding of the needs of our commercial partners within their area of expertise.
As well as the recently announced partnership with the global diagnostics firm, Qiagen, I talked to colleagues about the significant progress made in the renewal of our Boots strategic partnership - the budget has been agreed and approved at a level of funding and Full Economic Costing (FEC) that is of high value to the University; £7 million Innovate UK income and activity; goods licensing deals valued at €1.5 million for SenTraGor which enables better detection of the ageing of cells; and emerging partnerships with the pharmaceutical giants, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Takeda and Merck, as our clinical partnerships diversify and grow.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) has stated that our business engagement is strong and that having that ethos will positively feed into the training of our graduate students.
Meanwhile, it’s absolutely critical that the Faculty aligns itself with the focus areas of funders so that we can better compete for large-scale, multi-million-pound research grants based around critical mass. The Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is key because this is where the significant growth in research income will come from and we need to do things on a larger scale than historically. UKRI, for example, has a budget of £7 billion and so we need to align ourselves with what it’s looking to fund. It’s very, very important that we engage more with these funding streams. If there are issues that prevent us from upping our game, please do contact me – it’s my job to remove any stumbling blocks.
If you’d like to look at the slides from the Town Hall meeting, you can view them online now. They are deliberately text heavy to reflect information I shared with the Board – albeit in conversation, rather than a slide presentation – and that, in turn, I want to share with you. I’m strongly committed to transparency as we develop our new strategic plan and if you have any questions, as always, please do email me at graham.lord@manchester.ac.uk.
All the best, Graham
Professor Graham Lord
Vice-President and Dean