Value of universities identifying research priorities

The $105 million Queensland Bioscience Precinct is an important example of the type of synergy and leverage that can be achieved by different groups working together, according to University of Queensland (UQ) Vice-Chancellor and Chair of the Group of Eight universities, Professor John Hay.

The Precinct, which will house 700 scientists from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, CSIRO and Queensland Department of Primary Industries, will open on May 21.

Prof. Hay said UQ was the first to commit to the project, which received bipartisan support including $15 million from the Commonwealth's Federation Fund, $15 million from the Queensland Government (followed by a further $80 million over 10 years), $50 million from CSIRO, and $10 million from an American philanthropist, but none from Australian business.

"What these sums of money did was put an infrastructure in place. What the university did was identify what its priorities were and how they would conform to national and international priorities," Prof. Hay said.

"The collaboration among CSIRO and the university, among state and federal authorities presumes that the university took the hard decisions in identifying where its strengths and critical masses were, and decided to remove sources of funding from less well performing areas and reallocated them to areas of high potential and high performance.

"The need to collaborate with our sister universities was manifest. Before this project began The University of Queensland and University of Melbourne were collaborating partners in the Australian Genome Research Facility, a Major Nation Research Facility that undertakes DNA sequencing and genetic analysis for the Australian research community.

"If you can put a critical mass together and fund an infrastructure from a variety of sources you should also be looking at the next infrastructures, the next critical masses, so they don't, indeed, fail to overlap. You get that appropriate creative symbiosis between them.

"So, at the time we're opening the Institute of Molecular Bioscience and the Queensland Bioscience Precinct, we will be commencing building on the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) with similar sources of funding, but none yet from the Federal Government."

Prof. Hay leaves for the United States today to try to secure further funding for the successor project to the AIBN.

Item provided courtesy of The University of Queensland