BioImagingUK BIS Capital Infrastructure Submission: Biological and Medical Imaging

From BioImagingUKWiki

This is an ongoing collaborative process to submit a response to the BIS consultation from the Light and Electron Microscopy community as decided at the June 11th BioImagingUK Meeting, at LRI London.

Questions:

4 KEY QUESTION: What balance should we strike between meeting capital requirements at the individual research project and institution level, relative to the need for large-scale investments at national and international levels?

(1000 words maximum)

Our world class research environment is underpinned by funding for the capital requirements of individual research projects and institutions. 
To complement this, strategic decision making at the national and international level is often required to coordinate investments in the national 
interest.  This consultation seeks views on how to balance these complementary needs.

Authors: Kurt and Paul

5 How can we maximise collaboration, equipment sharing, and access to industry to ensure we make the most of this investment?

(1000 words maximum)

Authors: Dave

6 What factors should we consider when determining the research capital requirement of the higher education estate?

(1000 words maximum)

Author: Jason

7 Should - subject to state aids and other considerations - science and research capital be extended to Research and Technology Organisations and Independent Research Organisations when there are wider benefits for doing so?

(1000 words maximum)

8KEY QUESTION: What should be the UK's priorities for large scale capital investments in the national interest, including where appropriate collaborating in international projects?

(1000 words maximum)

The impressive strength and breadth of the UK research base means that we are presented with a huge range of potential 
investment opportunities. Demand inevitably outstrips funding. Therefore, there is a constant need to prioritise, and this 
consultation seeks your views to inform our approach. These strategic judgements require us to look first at what international 
competitors are investing in, and identifying where it is in the UK national interest to collaborate in international infrastructure
projects. This may involve significant contributions to projects around the world or hosting them in the UK. We are seeking
views on which of the important projects laid out in this consultation (pages 54-58) should be the highest priority. We are
also welcoming suggestions of new potential high priority projects not identified here.

Author: Jason Paul and Kurt

9 What should the criteria for prioritising projects look like?

(1000 words maximum)

Author: Anne and Lucy

10Are there new potential high priority projects which are not identified in this document?

(1000 word maximum)

Author: Lucy, Jemima and Pippa

11 Should we maintain a proportion of unallocated capital funding to respond to emerging priorities in the second half of this decade?

(1000 word maximum)

Initial authors, Ian Dobbie and Jason Swedlow.

It is often impossible to predict which directions or technologies will develop, and at what rate. The successful scientific research requires a landscape of both long term commitments to enable building significant research projects, programmes and institutes, but also a mechanism to rapidly redeploy some of its funding streams to take advantage of emerging fields.

Of particular interest in this regards are fields such as imaging, genomics, proteomics and computational approaches which are all advancing at a rapid pace and will enable significant new research to approaches in the next 5 years. It is significant that the UK is a leader in all these fields with a publication record second only the US, and world-leading research happening in all of these fields.

The recent MRC Next Generation Optical Microscopy call is a case in point. This call was initially posted as funded at a level of £18M, based on the extreme interest and strength of the applications the initiative was eventually funded at £25M, a significant increase in funding. This initiative has funded a number of developments in super-resolution imaging, eg Oxford NanO, Leeds?, NPL?, as well as providing funding for providing new instruments for general users (Edinburgh? Dundee? check examples).

12 Are the major international projects identified in the consultation the right priorities for this scale of investment at the international level? Are there other opportunities for UK involvement in major global collaborations?

(1000 words maximum)

Authors: Jason