From the Chancellery
It
gives me real pleasure to write this first Chancellery column of the new
year as the newest member of the UniSA senior management team.
The last four weeks have been a whirlwind of packing and unpacking, memorable farewell parties, and saying goodbye to good friends and colleagues at The University of Adelaide before being warmly welcomed at UniSA.
As I enjoy an early morning cappuccino at my new haunt, the Phat Coffee Shop on Hindley Street, before heading off to one of our four research campuses to hear more about the great research we do at UniSA, I reflect that while I may have only moved across town, really I have travelled a long way in the past month.
I came to Adelaide from Melbourne in 1992 because of the tremendous collaborative opportunities for work in my research field – the early origins of health and disease.
As a researcher at the coalface, I’ve experienced the real highs and lows of research funding outcomes, spent long nights crafting research manuscripts, and lived with the perpetual jet lag that comes with being an active member of a global research community.
During this time I also enjoyed a range of academic and research leadership roles – leading a department, a faculty, and a vibrant research centre. These roles gave me a great opportunity to engage in and champion the excellent research that we do in the state and to develop research policy and planning at the national and international level.
When the opportunity arose to consider taking on my current role at UniSA, I was impressed at the rate of growth in all measures of research and research training activity that has occurred in a short space of time at this relatively young institution.
I was also intrigued by the way UniSA had built such a distinct and dynamic research identity. This is an organisation with a collaborative and ‘can do’ culture, with researchers who work effectively with a broad range of external partners to generate innovative solutions to major problems.
Part of my role will be to build on this excellent base to grow our research capability and to foster those important external relationships.
There are of course, challenges ahead.
The national Research Quality Framework (RQF) exercise with its focus on measuring the academic quality and broad impact of research outputs will be a real challenge for us, primarily because the 2007 RQF will initially survey research outputs from a time period when we were in an early growth phase.
Given the time lag required to generate high quality research outputs, it is inevitable that the RQF will initially favour those institutions that have a long history of traditional research activity.
With the right mix of strategy, energy and confidence, however, we will work hard to build the output base required to meet the imperatives of the foreshadowed 2010 RQF exercise.
So thank you for the warm welcome and as the New Year begins, I look forward with anticipation and enthusiasm to the new challenges and opportunities ahead.