Research update by Professor Tim Elliott
First of all, many thanks to everyone for all your hard work gathering data in preparation for the final benchmarking exercise for the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014). We have just embarked on the final internal review ahead of the submission of our papers to the funding council at the end of November.
Plans are progressing well with our new Centre for Cancer Immunology, following the generous £10 million gift announced last year. University fundraisers are already engaged in a three year programme to supplement that donation. NHS estates staff have started working with us on what will be the biggest and most impressive cancer immunology research facility in the country with up to five floors and 25,000 square metres. We will be looking to recruit a new professorial group to join us and further strengthen our team in this specialism.
We have received several major programme grants in the last few months. They include new funding for Professors Christian Ottensmeier, Mark Cragg, Paul Little and Tilman Sanchez-Elsner. We have also been awarded two training fellowships for clinical academics from the Wellcome Trust for Chester Lai and Mark Jones. Overall, our success rate is good but we still need to increase the number of applications we make to the research councils where our market share is low. The Faculty Research office is there to help with all aspects of new applications and I am confident that our input increases your chance of success. We have just run our third grant-writing workshop, which was very well received and I hope will lead on to new fellowship applications thanks to the follow-up that our senior mentors have offered.
The excitement of discovery never seems to be far away in both established and new areas of the Faculty: too many to list here but I'm delighted to note that the Southampton Women's Survey continues to be a gold mine for researchers - Dr Katherine Pike has used data from 12,500 women on the study to produce an important paper on maternal obesity and children's weight gain.
Also Immunologist Dr Tony Williams is working on high profile research with the geneticists in Southampton and Salisbury sequencing the genome to diagnose very rare inherited diseases of the immune system. I expect some of the outcomes of his exciting research with families will be publicised shortly.