Professor Willie Donnelly:

From my own experience, I would like to urge caution in this debate about applied against fundamental research. People would see my background in telecoms as being applied, but I am also a supervisor of up to 30 PhD students. Regardless of whether they are in my area or in the arts or humanities, they are creating fundamental knowledge. The requirement to graduate as a PhD student is exactly the same. The only difference is that one may find an application for that knowledge earlier. Maybe the environment around which the work is being done informs that application, but how does one define applied research? The idea was mentioned of somebody looking at the history of the role of women in the Middle Ages. If that informs the way we define the role of women in the workplace today, that is applied research, but the foundation may be fundamental. That is very important. We are talking about the definitions to move away from such demarcation. At the basis of all research is the PhD student. It is the creation of knowledge. When we are fortunate in society, we may find an immediate application of that knowledge and other times something happens whereby we find an application of knowledge. Covid was an example of that. Sometimes we accept we are doing research on cancer and the application will be in 20 years' time. It is very important, when we are a small country with a relatively small community, that we do not use those demarcation lines and just say this is about doing high-quality research and creating new knowledge. In some areas, such as in an engineering discipline, we will apply that knowledge immediately, but even in humanities, we will apply the knowledge. I caution against such a demarcation.