STFC Council meeting, 28-29 January 2008

At its meeting on 29th January 2008 the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) confirmed its commitment to the development of the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus, as one of two national science and innovation campuses that it will develop. In doing so the Council welcomed the strong and visible support from the North West Regional Development Agency, the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster, and Halton Borough Council.

The Council is committed to retaining key scientific and technology expertise at Daresbury in high performance computing, accelerator and detector research, development for next generation facilities, and underpinning technologies, and is looking to expand expertise on this site as its plans develop.

It will seek the further development of partnership ventures such as the Cockcroft Centre, an international centre for accelerator science and technology. The Council has also developed plans for major publicly funded capital investment. These include the Hartree Centre which will be a national centre for high performance computing.

Key staff at Daresbury will be involved in developing a proposal for a next generation light source, which will use synchrotron and laser light to explore the dynamics of matter across many scientific disciplines.

The existing research programme on the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS), the closure of which was decided in 2005 for scientific reasons, will be complete by September 2008. The closure will involve 180 job losses over the next two years. Other than this, no compulsory redundancies will take place before the McKillop Review reports in the summer of 2008.

The future staffing levels will be contingent both on the Council’s on-going programme, and further public and private funding to develop the facilities at Daresbury. Decisions on future development will also be informed by the findings of the McKillop Review.

Notes to Editors

McKillop Review

Led by Sir Tom McKillop, who is currently chairing the Manchester Independent Economic Review, the government initiated McKillop review will assess the current and potential contribution of the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus to science and innovation in the UK economy and to the Northwest in particular. It will have a particular reference to the scale and scope needed to achieve national and international significance.

The review is due in the summer 2008.

Hartree Centre

The Hartree Centre at the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus will be a new kind of computational sciences institute for the UK. It will bring together academic, government and industry communities and focus on multi-disciplinary, multi-scale, efficient and effective simulation. The goal is to provide a step-change in modeling capabilities for strategic themes in energy, life sciences, the environment, materials, and fundamental physics.

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