Getting on the research trail

If you want to attract more youngsters into third-level research, you have to start to interest them at an early stage in their undergraduate careers. Leave it until their final year, and you'll probably be too late. So says Dr Tom McCarthy, who, since January, has been dean of research and postgraduate studies at NUI, Maynooth. Bright students should be encouraged to work on college research projects during the holidays, he argues, to give them a taste for research. This costs money and colleges need discretionary funds so they can employ these student interns.

When McCarthy arrived back in Ireland after completing his postgraduate studies in Canada, he was immediately struck by the fact that Irish universities hardly rate on the international visiting speakers trail. A graduate of UCC who returned to lecture in his alma mater, McCarthy worked for his PhD in economics at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. "I grew used to an environment where there were there visiting speakers every week," he says. "They were the stars of economics. As a graduate student, I had access to the greatest names in the discipline - and to all the new, up-and-coming people." Ireland, McCarthy asserts, needs to get on the international itineraries of the world's leading researchers. It's happening in other countries constantly and Irish students are missing out.

Despite our historic lack of funding, however, Ireland produces excellent researchers, he says. "External examiners constantly tell us that we maintain standards of excellence that are only maintained in the top British universities, where the student-teacher ratio is 10:1 (compared with 23:1 here)," McCarthy notes. "We have researchers of world ranking and produce graduates who are accepted into the world's top graduate schools and leading companies, and we've done this against the odds. With the new research funding coming on stream, we can consolidate what we've been doing in the past." McCarthy foresees a time, when Ireland, too, will be attracting top graduate students from abroad. "In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s bright Irish people went abroad for research. Some of them returned and were pivotal in developing graduates and researchers at home over recent decades. Now that we can offer more research and training here, we can begin to attract the best foreign students." Attracting the world's best is vital - we shouldn't limit ourselves, he says.

With a student enrolment of just under 5,000, Maynooth is one of Ireland's smaller universities. The traditional view of the college is that it is big on arts and relatively small on science. McCarthy, however, points out that in international terms, the faculty mix at Maynooth is less than unusual. "Our view of what a university should be is often coloured by what we already have. In Ireland most of our universities offer medicine, law and engineering. But in Britain and the US, for example, there are many universities which don't have these faculties." Despite its size and relative lack of profile in science, Maynooth has considerable research strengths in this and other areas. Take immunology, for example. NUI, Maynooth is rated fifth in Europe and 16th in the world for its immunology research by the Institute of Scientific Information, which is the main database for citations. Meanwhile, according to the European Economic Association, Maynooth's economics' department ranks first in Ireland.

The university is also strong in geography, McCarthy notes. "They have an astonishing publications' record - an average of six papers per person over a decade," he says.

Over the last few years, NUI Maynooth has been working hard to boost its research record. Since 1993, the college has spent £25 million on improving the physical infrastructure for science. Come October, Maynooth's first electronic engineering students will be admitted, while software engineering has undergone an expansion. This year, meanwhile, the university has committed £350,000 to research activities including financial support for individual and teams of academics, postgraduates and for research with business and community groups. Maynooth's research committee is a subsidiary of the academic council. Since the HEA's Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI) was first announced in 1998, the committee's work has been dominated by it. "Between December 1998 and February 1999, we have spent our time inviting, evaluating and prioritising research proposals from staff. It's involved us in communicating with all researchers," McCarthy notes.

Until now, he says, universities have had little involvement in providing high levels of research support. In the event, Maynooth was awarded £9 million for immunology and agriecology and bio-engineering under the first cycle of the HEA's PRTLI scheme. In the second cycle, Maynooth has applied for funding for a national institute of regional and spatial analysis. This, says McCarthy, will build on the university's strengths in economics and geography. Different universities have different strengths. One of the benefits of the PRTLI programme is that universities have been forced to identify their strengths. Prioritising, however, can lead to difficulties. "You have to make difficult decisions and keep on board people who are doing good work, but who don't fit the PRTLI criteria," McCarthy notes.