Professor Karina Pierce:

With my other half I am the director of external relations in the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science. Professor Monahan is my head of school and he tasked me with the establishment of an external advisory board and Dr. Lalor sits on that board. In the university some of us are out and about quite a bit but you can exist in a bubble so the external advisory board seeks to ensure we are well linked in with industry. There are 12 members on the board. It was only established last year and we meet a couple of times a year. We met in the university last year and we brought the group to UCD Lyons Farm. There would be representatives from the meat and dairy sectors; Teagasc; the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine; and other areas on the board. It seeks to look at areas such as graduate attributes, the employability of our graduates and what skills they need to have. We seek to ensure that from an educational perspective, and from the perspective of all the translational skills we talk about in terms of an ability to negotiate, present and represent, our graduates are the best they can be. Industry is keen to tell us about that so that has been useful for us and then we have to try to bring that back in. It is also about research, what research we are conducting, where industry sees gaps and how we can maybe address those. We have only had a couple of meetings but they have been useful and we have another meeting due before the end of the year. The Senator mentioned investment in UCD Lyons Farm, and I might pass that to Professor Monahan.