Australia needs to rebalance its research funding

Australia’s research effort should focus more on engineering, materials science and computer science.

The way that government research funding is currently proportioned does not match the relative needs of Australia, its people and especially its industry, and should be realigned to better support the Australian economy.

Research funding in Australia is dominated by health and medical research funding, meaning any rankings of “research intensity” – generally based on analysis of either total research income or volume of research outputs – are biased towards universities with longstanding medical faculties and close affiliations with medical research institutes and hospitals, mainly the Group of Eight universities.

The level of health and medical research intensity is an important consideration for Australia, given our ageing population and our shared desire for longer, healthier lives.

You can, however, readily argue that it is far from being one of the most important research fields when it comes to Australia’s economic prosperity and social wellbeing.

An overemphasis on health and medical research is not aligned to the requirements of much of Australia’s wealth generating industry.

As a nation, we need to be generating wealth to afford quality education and health systems, maintain national security, support social cohesion measures, manage environmental remediation and custodianship, improve the liveability and sustainability of our cities and regions, promote the arts, and advance positive culture-based agendas, among other things.

Economic prosperity matters. Australia’s government research funding distribution should be better linked to what matters for the Australian economy.

Enabling Australian production and services, in all their forms, through research translation and innovation should be a particularly strong focus.

If we remove the elephant in the room, and focus on non-medical areas of research, then a very different order emerges in terms of the most research-intensive universities in areas of economic importance to Australia.

To emphasise the point, I have investigated research intensity based on the number of research outputs of Australian universities in three subject areas: engineering; materials science; and computer science. (This is sourced from the Scopus database for 2022, as accessed in July 2023.)

Throughout the world, engineering is recognised as being directly linked to economic prosperity. The pathway to impact for many scientific discoveries is through an engineering process and/or engineered product.

Science and engineering are part of a joined-up value chain. For example, all engineered products contain materials. Materials science is therefore part of the engineering value chain. Digital innovation, where products and services frequently come together, usually involves materials, engineering and computing coming together.

In Australia, the top 10 engineering universities in order of most research intensive first are UNSW, UTS, RMIT, Sydney, Monash, Queensland, Melbourne, Deakin, QUT and Swinburne.

For materials science the top 10 in order are UNSW, Queensland, Monash, RMIT, Sydney, UTS, Wollongong, ANU, Melbourne, and QUT.

For computer science the top 10 in order is: UTS, Sydney, UNSW, Monash, Melbourne, Deakin, RMIT, Queensland, ANU, and Macquarie.

I suggest we move towards being more sophisticated and nuanced in our national discourse around research-intensity.

As a nation we need to rethink the balance of government allocated research funding particularly through Commonwealth competitive grant schemes and research block grants.

The University Accord process, and the review of government funding of university research, could be a mechanism to address the current significant imbalance between health and medical research and other areas of research needed to ensure a prosperous Australia.

Professor Calum Drummond is deputy vice-chancellor, research and innovation, at RMIT University.