Professor Cormac Taylor:

I will maybe address the first question with regard to the AHSS. If anybody needs to be concerned, it is those of us on the STEM side. I actually embrace the opportunity for STEM and AHSS to be seen as equal partners. One of the great opportunities here will be for collaboration across the disciplines. I work at the school of medicine and many of our interests stretch into, for example, the social sciences, and there are great opportunities in the history of medicine. Many opportunities will actually come from that. I agree totally that there should be equal opportunity, of course.

With regard to the make-up of the board, my biggest concern is that there will not be academic representation on the board. It is something that happened in previous funding agencies where there was very much an overemphasis on applied, large-scale industrial type grants and boards were very much dominated by industry and Government Members rather than the actual constituents who were doing the work themselves, namely, the academics. I would like to see at least 50% academic representation and they would be active researchers. It has been mentioned that perhaps they should be international. I definitely think there should be international representation but I also personally feel there should be senior national representation for both - I am not going to call them sides of the aisle any more - partners of STEM and AHSS. I really think that is the key issue that we as an academic research community will want to see if we are going to be led to believe that this agency will truly change the way funding is being done.