ADVANCED MATERIALS

Interdisciplinarv Research Centres-Centres of Excellence or Contention?

By Bruce A. Joyce*
The IRCs, more formally known as Interdisciplinary Research Centres, have developed with what by normal British university standards would be regarded as unseemly haste. They are the result of an amalgamation of ideas originating from at least three sources, including the Advisory Board to the Research Councils (ABRC) which in 1987 published its Strategy for the Science Base, by Professor E. u! (Bill) Mitchell, chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) and the chief scientific adviser to the Cabinet Office, Mr (now Sir) John FaircZough. The accelerating force was, however, the emergence of high (hype?) T, superconductors precisely when the concept of IRCs was first being floated. At that time a high-T, center was an essential scientific macho symbol for any country claiming to be serious about its research activities, and so the first IRC was born in Cambridge in December 1987. From such beginnings . . . What then is an IRC? Other than the name there is no single answer. In principle they represent a new means of organizing university research, and are designed to promote the selectivity and concentration of resources, interdisciplinarity, identifiable and coherent programs, positive management, close links with (international?) industry and a throughput of visiting research workers and well trained students, all subject to close monitoring and evaluation, but having a maximum lifetime of ten years with guaranteed funding for six. In practice there are as many operating styles as there are IRCs, but they have all been created to tackle problems which to a greater or lesser extent fall outside the conventional organization of university research. The ideal is for an IRC to be housed in its own building. In a few cases this has happened, but in general it has not, since there was no provision of funds for new buildings, only comparatively small sums for alterations. If a university which had been awarded an IRC was fortunate enough to have a several thousand square meter building standing idle, all was well, otherwise it was a case of making the best of whatever broadly contiguous (sic) space could be made available. For example, the Surface Science IRC at Liverpool University is completely housed in the old van de Graaf
[*I
Prof. B. A. Joyce University of London Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Semiconductor Materials The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College Prince Consort Road, London SW72BZ (UK)

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building, apart from a beam line at the Daresbury SRS facility. On the other hand, the Semiconductor Materials IRC at the University of London is spread between Imperial College, University College and Queen Mary College, with a small activity at Oxford. Even then, at the lead institution (Imperial College), the IRC has several separate locations in different departments. I have referred to a university being awarded an IRC, but how does this happen? On the whole by a process of open competition, in which bids are invited from any interested HEIs (higher education institutions). In a very few cases invitations have been restricted. The choice of subject areas in which to establish IRCs was based on advice given to the SERC from a wide range of academic, government and industrial organizations and individuals, but the selection procedures both for institutions and subjects have been criticized in the Flemming report to the ABRC. As someone who sat on both sides of the selection table (for different IRCs!), I am only too well aware of the amount of work involved in bidding for, and assessing, the award of an IRC and although open competition can be seen to be fair, more restrictions on the invitation to bid would probably have been advantageous. In hindsight, a few of the chosen topics may seem anomalous, but equally, some of the subjects selected were crying out for an interdisciplinary approach. Perhaps semiconductor materials is a prime example! Within an IRC, teams are formed principally from existing members of academic staff of all of the institutions and departments involved. The provision made by the SERC fox supporting additional post-doctoral workers (in terms of the numbers of man-months allocated) verges on the sub-critical-at least in my IRC. In many cases, the director is the only senior academic employed full-time in the centre, with others dividing their time between their normal departments and the IRC. This, combined with the displaced geography of most IRCs, has created the need for management within fuzzy boundaries to be the guiding principle of most directors. In practice, this means establishing good working relationships with the host departments-not always easy when, after the initial euphoria of money for all has faded away and the new resources found to be finite after all, the IRC is perceived as something of an asset stripper, perhaps unfairly, but certainly heartfelt. f This brings me to the question of the management o IRCs. The very idea of managed research is anathema to
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many academics, but I believe this attitude to be wrong on several counts. In the first place, big science has been managed for years and few would deny the success of CERN or the achievements of astrophysics. Then there is the issue of what is managed, and it cannot be emphasized too strongly that it is primarily resources and facilities. It is the job of the director to encourage creativity, not stifle it with heavyhanded management. Nor do I accept that dribbling resources into man and boy efforts in a largely unstructured manner is more likely to produce important innovations, as some would claim. Perhaps there is a place for both approaches. Let me also dispel the myth that because they are managed, IRCs are more like industrial research laboratories than universities. Having spent over thirty years in industrial research I can assure my academic colleagues that there is no similarity, but efficiency might be improved if there were! And efficiency is not necessarily a dirty word when resources are limited. IRCs may be more managed than conventional departments, but they are certainly required to account for their activities much more rigorously. They are answerable in the first instance to a steering committee chosen partly by the IRC itself and partly by the SERC, with a chairman who is a member of the Council or of equivalent status. There is also industrial representation. The IRC must submit annually a detailed report, a forward projection, and a budget. They are subject to a minor review after two years and a major one after four, the result of which determines whether the centre ceases to receive special funding after six years or goes on to its maximum lifetime of ten years. This automatic extinction (the sunset clause) was praised in the Flemming report,

Editorial Essay

but I regard it as a major weakness. It implies to me the tacit assumption that the concepts of IRCs is a ten year experiment with a known result-that they will fail-otherwise why write them off after a fixed period without further consideration of their validity and viability? Personally, I have much more faith. Not all IRCs will succeed, but I am confident that several will, especially in those subject areas which clearly span departmental boundaries. In the words of the Edwards report on the Future of University Physics to the University Grants Committee: Any comparison of university and industrial or government science brings out the awful fact that most of the whitehot spots in science are interdisciplinary and are weakly represented in universities. The new Interdisciplinary Research Centres may put this right, but it is not simply a matter of cooperation of departments but actual fusion which is required to cope adequately with modern movements in science . . . The observer external to the UK science scene detects at once a deep problem in our basic research structure. This is that it is based on the traditional university disciplines, whereas research is based on nature or technology, neither of which pays much attention to tradition . . .

We welcome the funding of the IRCs as a vehicle for meeting the need to initiate coordinated research in strategic multi-disciplinary areas.

Bruce A . Joyce, Director ofthe Semiconductor Materials IRC based at Imperial College, University of London (since 1988) started his scientific career studying chemistry at the University of Birmingham where he gained a B.Sc. in 1956. He then moved to industry, working for Plessey (1958-1969) bejore moving on to the Philips Research Laboratories in Redhill where he worked j r o m 1969-1988. He was awarded a D S c . (Chemistry) by Birmingham University in 1973. He has held a number of Visiting Professorships, notably at Imperial College (Physics, 1982- 1988), the University of Sussex (Physics, since 1985) and the University of Liverpool (Materials Science, since 1987) and has been a Wolfson Industrial Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, since 1987. He was awarded the Duddell Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (1981) and the IBM (Europe) Science and Technology Prize (1986) for his work on molecular beam epitaxy. He is a member ofseveral SERC committees andpanels and was a member ofthe UGC Physical Sciences Sub-Committee. His research interests are the physics and chemistry of semiconductor surfaces and thin films.
The following review articles will be published in future issues:

B. Tieke: Langmuir-Blodgett Films for Electronic Applications

K. J Hiittinger: High Performance Graphite Lattice Materials P. Grant; High Temperature Superconductivity: Four Years since Bednorz and Miiller S. Iyer, N . Slagg: Energetic Materials
M . Armand: Polymers with Ionic Conductivity

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