About Us
Our services involve supporting and developing all University research, commercial services, intellectual property, consultancy, and other externally funded projects. The value of individual projects varies from several hundred pounds to projects worth in excess of £9m.
One of our principal roles is to support academic staff to find sources of
funding and then to negotiate the appropriate financial and legal relationship
with the sponsor. Our key role is to help staff weave their way through the
many regulations and policies of the diverse organisations which support project
activity at the University. A key goal is to maximise University benefit and
control risk.
We support the senior management of the University
with the operation of major areas of activity related to research and third
strand activities; the most obvious examples are the central administration of
the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the servicing of Equity Committee. Overall
the activities involving the Directorate represent around 40 per cent of the
University’s income and involve well in excess of 2,000 projects with 2000
partners and 700 sponsors/clients.
We are working hard to continuously improve our processes, seeking to get the right balance between flexibility, compliance and efficiency in an increasingly regulatory and audit driven landscape. We would be grateful for all feedback on information you find useful to be included on the web-site.
Dr Douglas Robertson
Director of Research & Enterprise Services