Research without walls

Newcastle University specialises in mixing the disciplines, with surprising results

Newcastle University is breaking new ground with the dynamic research culture it has evolved. The university believes in co-operation between departments, and has created more than 50 interdisciplinary research centres. The result is an ethos of diversity and collaboration.

One could call it research without walls. While traditional research groups and individual scholars continue to flourish withing their subject areas, many researchers have the advantage of also being attached to one or more interdisciplinary research centres. This provides them with access to a wider field of expertise, both within the university and with collaborating institutions at home and abroad.

Newcastle University is a member of the Russell Group of 17 major research institutions in the UK and is among the top half-dozen universities in terms of European research funding. Its reputation is international. For example, its Fossil Fuels and Environmental Geochemistry Postgraduate Institute is among the largest academic units of its type in the world. It is dedicated to training and research and has a compliment of about 90 postgraduates, research associates and support staff. The institute collaborates with most of the major oil companies and its research ranges from predicting oil-bearing capacity of rock strata to archaeological topics such as dinosaur bones and investigating the historic occurrence of tuberculosis in man.

Applying past knowledge to modern medicine is the purpose of another of Newcastle University's interdisciplinary groups, the Medicinal Plant Research Centre, which draws together a seemingly unlikely combination of researchers in the Departments of Classics, Agricultural and Environmental Science, Neurosciences and Psychiatry, and the Institute for the Health of the Elderly. The centre aims to find plant sources for novel drugs which could be applied to conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, stroke and diabetes. Plants are identified through archival research and then grown in the University's Moorbank Botanical Garden.

The Institute for the Health of the Elderly is itself a leading international centre for research into age-related diseases, which builds on Newcastle's long-established reputation for excellence in the field of health and older people. The institute has brought together a spectrum of researchers including more than 120 academic staff from geriatric medicine, psychiatry, health services research, neurosciences, and smaller groups from 10 other departments including dentistry and primary health care.

A link between the clinical and chemical sciences is provided by the Anti-Cancer Drug Discovery Initiative (ADDI), run jointly by the Cancer Research Unit and the Department of Chemistry. ADDI is at the forefront of research and collaborates with Oxford and Cambridge unversities as well as major pharmaceutical companies. A new suite of laboratories dedicated to ADDI research is due to open at Newcastle University next month, with funding from the university, the Wolfson Foundation, and the Cancer Research Campaign.

ADDI recently secured more than pounds 500,000 funding from US-based Agouron Pharmaceuticals to develop enzyme inhibitors which potentiate the activity of anti-cancer drugs and radiotherapy.

It is perhaps not surprising that the last national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) rated virtually all research at Newcastle as of national or international importance.

One measure of a university's international standing is its ability to attract research funding from the European Union. In this respect, Newcastle is among the top six universities in the UK, and has more than 200 European research and development projects taking place. For example, Newcastle is among a small group of European universities examining the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and its effects on the environment, a project which may influence CAP policy across Europe for years to come.

Newcastle is well-equipped to deal with the complexity of CAP's environmental consequences because the research project is being conducted by an established interdisciplinary group, the Centre for Rural Economy, which can draw on a range of specialists including planners, geographers, agriculturists, economists, and sociologists.

The research culture at Newcastle University directly benefits its "home ground" in the North-east. A major study of diet and health among families in Newcastle is being conducted by the University's Human Nutrition Research Centre, run jointly by the School of Clinical Medical Sciences and the Department of Biological and Nutritional Sciences. The study is being funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food with a view to developing a national programme of healthier eating. Local schools are frequently involved in research carried out by the University's Department of Education, which provides advice at local and national level. Only last month the University's Centre for Higher Education Research was awarded pounds 100,000 by the Teacher Training Agency to study the reasons for under- representation of ethnic minorities in teacher training.

The university also helps to bring prosperity and jobs to the region. The international reputation of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering helped to secure the location of Siemens' pounds 1.1bn semiconductor plant just a few miles from the university. The Regional Centre for Innovation in Engineering Design (RCID) has helped more than 300 small and medium- sized companies in the North-east to develop products by tapping into the technology and design expertise at the University. RCID was praised in the Dearing report on higher education for its contribution to the region and it has become a model for other universities.

Professor Andrew Hamnett, Newcastle pro-vice-chancellor, said: "Many problems in strategic research are highly multi-disciplinary in nature, and progress can only be made by bringing together experts from different traditional disciplines. The research carried out by such teams is often ground-breaking, and the postgraduate students trained in this research can enter a wide range of rewarding careers."