Research Newsletter - Issue 76: Vice President for Research
Professor John Doyle, has been appointed Vice President for Research at Dublin City University.
Professor Doyle has said:
I am delighted and honoured to be appointed as DCU’s new Vice President for Research. My promise is that I will be a visible VP around the DCU community, a champion for research certainly, but also listening to the needs of researchers and working to make DCU an even better and more supportive place to do research.
Professor John Doyle
We have excellent teams of researchers right across the DCU community – in each of our five Faculties and in our research centres and institutes. We have not perhaps always been good at telling our own story and bringing that research to those who will be, or who should be, interested in it. I hope to improve our capacity to do so and support the research community in effectively maximising the impact of what we do.
There are of course challenges too, in an ever more competitive research environment. We need to explore how we can maximise our research publications, in the high-impact peer-reviewed journals, where the research is most likely to be read. We need to grow our PhD researcher community, and also engage with funders to improve the level of PhD stipends. We need funders to be more realistic about post-doctoral researchers’ salaries and the lengths of their contracts. We need funding to improve and maintain our research facilities.
In a world where accountability is an increasing requirement, measuring research ‘performance’ is part of what a modern university needs to do. We cannot and should not try to measure everything, and researchers need autonomy as well as goals and targets. My ambition will be only to measure and centrally report on a few core research targets. If we all work towards meeting a small number of crucial goals, we can also give time to other aspects of research that we personally value, or which are important at a discipline level. In this way I think we can both significantly increase the international and national visibility of our work, while also generating a positive environment, where people want to come to work in DCU and want to stay here.
I look forward to meeting you all over the coming months in a range of meetings and other events.
Regards,
John Doyle