London

Physicists at Edinburgh's James Clerk Maxwell building will forge alliances with Scottish colleagues. Credit: UNIV. EDINBURGH

Scotland's top physicists are planning to band together to create a single national physics department. Advocates say that the plan will help them to compete with the world's élite research institutions

Under the scheme, which is part of a wider discussion about pooling resources across Scottish science, the country's six highest-rated physics departments will function as a single unit — the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA). Members would remain in their individual universities but would bid for big grants together and offer joint graduate courses. Undergraduate teaching would remain outside the collaboration.

“This will brand Scottish physics with a strong identity,” says Alan Miller, the vice-principal for research at the University of St Andrews, which is a partner in SUPA. “We want to compete with Oxford, Cambridge and even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.”

The idea, which will be considered by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council on 25 June, would involve the creation of about 12 new positions at St Andrews and the other SUPA universities — Glasgow, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, Strathclyde and Paisley. Miller puts the cost at £30 million (US$55 million) over five years, but says that it would pay for itself in the long-term by generating extra research income.

Some universities are likely to take leading roles in certain subjects, says Miller. For example, Glasgow and St Andrews have strengths in particle physics and materials, respectively. But he rules out the possibility of closing down groups or moving researchers to a single physics building at one site.

The move reflects changes in England, where, for example, the University of Manchester and UMIST (the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) are merging to create a stronger, single institution, due to open in October. Officials at University College London and Imperial College London flirted with a merger idea in 2002, before backing down in the face of staff protests (see Nature 420, 350; 200210.1038/420350a). In both cases, the need to become more globally competitive was the driver for change.

The trend may also be repeated in other subjects in Scotland. On the east coast, the chemistry departments at the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are considering merging their research and graduate teaching functions. A similar unit may be formed in the west of the country by the chemistry departments at Glasgow and Strathclyde.

“We'd welcome this,” says Sean McWhinnie, science-policy manager at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London. “In Manchester, the merger will produce a world-class chemistry department. The same would apply in Scotland.”

Council officials say that it is too early to judge whether the approach should be applied more widely, but add that they are discussing the possibility with regard to biomedical research and the Earth sciences.