Welsh academics urged to join research council boards

Universities in Wales should be “more proactive” in encouraging their researchers to join research council boards and committees, according to a higher education vision document published by the Welsh education minister.

Leighton Andrews’s policy document also recommends that “academic teams must engage fully with increasingly competitive research funding processes”. This includes receiving a larger share of research council funding and funding from European Union programmes.

Compared with the UK overall, “Wales achieves less than its population share of competitively awarded research funding. Our universities must therefore be ambitious to gain competitive funding for inventive and challenging science research, building on good examples of success,” the document says.