Category Archives: Research

Inefficiency as a Blessing in Disguise

In the process of tidying up my office I have managed to fill several large bins for recycling. I found many unremembered old reports. Indeed, sometimes I found multiple copies due to my incompetence in remembering where I filed the … Continue reading

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Bin the Past

My last post talked about binning a word, ‘boffin’, but currently I’m literally binning my past. As my former home of the Cavendish Laboratory prepares to move into its shiny new buildings, the Dolby Centre, I need to clear out … Continue reading

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Renaissance Man?

This week the sad news of the death of physicist and erstwhile colleague Tom McLeish was announced, a soft matter theorist and committed interdisciplinarian – as well as a committed Christian. He is particularly associated with developing theories for the … Continue reading

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What Does Excellence Look Like?

Harnessing the Metric Tide, the recently-published follow-on to the 2015 Report The Metric Tide, provides a welcome focus on our cultures and practice within HEIs. It imagines an ecosystem where metrics are collected which inform the community about the health … Continue reading

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Research Leadership: Are we Getting it Right?

We are stuck in an academic world where the model of how science research is done appears not to have shifted much from that deemed appropriate fifty years ago. Back then (more or less when I set out, give or … Continue reading

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