Professor Raffaella Villa
Associate Dean for Research and Business Innovation
I would like again to formally thank everyone who contributed to our REF 2021 submissions including Unit of Assessment (UOA) co-ordinators, impact case study authors, staff who submitted outputs and all the admin support staff from CEM RIO.
I am proud of the fact that DMU took an inclusive approach to REF 2021 and submitted more researchers than ever before (485 in 2021 vs 218 in 2014), representing a more diverse base, in terms of gender and ethnicity. Although we lost some ground in our ranking in terms of our Grade Point Average or GPA (which is an indicative measure of the overall quality of research) but our research intensity (power) increased.
In CEM we submitted 169 staff members, representing 65% of eligible staff. Of the 498 research outputs submitted, 20% were judged to be world leading (4) and 50% internationally excellent (3). Our impact was judged to be strong overall, with three UOAs having world-leading (4) impact: UOA 11 (10%), UOA 13 (50%) and UOA 33 (33%) and all UOAs scoring well in the 3band: UOA 11 (30%), UOA 12 (100%), UOA13 (50%), UOA 33 (33%) and UOA 34 (75%). Finally, the majority of our research environment was judged to be ‘conducive to producing research of internationally excellent quality and enabling very considerable impact, in terms of its vitality and sustainability’.
Despite all the changes happening in the university, CEM managed to achieve its research income target for the financial year 2021/22. More importantly we have improved the quality and value of our submissions, resulting in a higher success rate (25%) from fewer submissions.
An analysis of our research income over the last REF period (2013-2021) shows that CEM has historically relied strongly on EU funding (50%), followed by UKRI (23%), UK Government (15%) and industry (8%). Going forward, we need to maintain a diversified portfolio of funders, to support our ECRs in winning UKRI grants and to improve further our engagement with industry, government and society to raise our local and national impact.
The objectives of our research strategy for the next 5 years include increasing the value of our grant applications, growing the number of staff with research allocation and time allocated to projects, enhancing PGR recruitment and improving the quality of our outputs. We also want to build greater research impact in the wider community and to enhance funded research and enterprise activity by integrating research-informed teaching across the School and engaging in interdisciplinary research.