Tag: industry

Food has been hitting the headlines in the past week or so warning us of shortages in various vegetables – particularly courgettes, iceberg lettuce and peppers – with subsequent jumps in the price of such produce and even rationing by some supermarkets. This example, albeit modest in my book, highlights the fragility of our food supply chains by providing yet another demonstration of how extreme weather events – in this case snow in southern Spain – can impact the supply of food stuffs we take for granted. […]

Over the next few weeks, until I leave BBSRC at the end of the month, I want to focus on some of the areas of the BBSRC portfolio activities which I think have been particularly important in terms of our deliverables over the last two and half years.

BBSRC’s spending review preparations have focused very much on our role in building the bioeconomy and in driving the argument for a Bioeconomy Strategy for the UK. […]

The last week has been fairly momentous for me on the personal front as I announced last Monday that I will be leaving BBSRC at the end of February, after the spending review allocations. This is something that I do with mixed emotions as I have really enjoyed my time at BBSRC and working with the fabulous team here at the Swindon office. I will also miss the interactions with the institutes and the researchers we fund at universities. I have learnt a lot about the many different aspects of BBSRC science from wheat to gribbles but I still have three months left and there’s a lot to do!! […]

Reproducibility and bias in the reporting of experimental findings continues to be an important issue for science. This has been reinforced with the publication of a series of articles in Nature and an interesting paper analysing in vivo studies in PLoS. […]

The last few weeks have been important for UK science. I was heavily involved working with a team across the Research Councils to stage the RCUK Research, Innovate, Grow event that was held on 2 July in Westminster. The aim of this event was to showcase the exciting research that the Research Councils invest in from both an academic and industrial point of view, identify key areas of focus and issues to address going forward. There were some really excellent talks including from speakers representing AstraZeneca, Rolls Royce, the Farr Institute, EMBL-EBI, Synthace, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and Innovate UK. […]