SSPC: Fostering links between academia and industry

A knowledge economy depends entirely on having a ready supply of knowledge workers. That is never more the case than in the life sciences sector, where a high level of educational attainment is required simply to get in the door. It’s not an industry that can rely on “sitting with Nellie”.

Rather, it requires a strong pipeline of doctoral and post-doctoral researchers ready to make the transition into industry. Much work is being done to ensure these are available.

Since 2013 the Synthesis and Solid State Pharmaceutical Centre (SSPC), the world leading Science Foundation Ireland-funded research centre hosted by the University of Limerick (UL), has supported 35 three-month PhD placements in industry.

This gives SSPC’s industry partners a valuable opportunity to engage with and recruit researchers that have both the desired skill-set and a focus on innovation and research in the pharma sector.

But the centre’s work fostering the links between academia and industry starts much earlier, thanks to a wide-ranging education and public engagement programme (EPE) targeting primary and secondary school pupils, parents and teachers, as well as third- and fourth-level college students.

Denise Croker is a chemical engineer, and PhD holder, who has walked this particular talk, having switched between academia and the pharmaceutical sector throughout her career. Currently a lecturer at UL, she is actively involved in public engagement on behalf of the SSPC, going into classrooms to talk about the importance of science, and in particular the pharma sector.

"One of the things I do is ask the children what Ireland's biggest export is, and I put up a picture of a cow, Guinness and a microchip, but the answer is a tablet," says Croker. It is estimated that half pharmaceutical products globally will have passed through Ireland for at least some part of their development, manufacturing, packaging or supply. "It's a massive Irish success story that doesn't get the general recognition it deserves," says Croker.

One of the main reasons why Ireland punches above its weight in terms of life sciences globally is because of the success we have had in attracting investment from overseas pharma companies. It has helped create a virtuous circle in so far as the more pharma FDI that is attracted, the deeper the skills and expertise pool here, which in turn attracts more investment.

Right now the sector is booming, to the point that shortages are opening up for skills like chemical engineering. “But generally it is a question of supply and demand; the more jobs there are for PhDs, the more PhDs we will have,” she says.

At present, 60 per cent of the PhD holders coming out of the SSPC are going into industry, compared with a general average of 35 per cent. This increased migration from academia to industry is good both for industry and for the individuals themselves, “because there simply aren’t enough academic jobs for all the PhDs we have. In the past, you would do a PhD and expect to go into academia. It was a closed loop. That is not the case anymore,” she says.

While the traditional view of the PhD was that it signalled a person with knowledge that was a mile deep but an inch wide, that is not the case. “For a start, to come through that four years shows extreme determination, plus project management skills and communication skills - you have to be able to speak at international conferences - so what industry gets is in fact a well balanced all-rounder. And at SSPC, all our groups do industrial placements and so are very tuned in to industry too.”

Success breeds success, and Ireland’s track record of delivering high calibre Stem graduates into industry has helped the pharma sector develop. “If you go back even to 2008 you will see that the pharma companies here were concerned with making product, they didn’t care what the material was, it about getting it out the door. Now companies are coming here at an earlier stage. Not at drug development but certainly drug commercialisation stage, so there is a lot of opportunity opening up in this sector.”

The biggest risks currently are if President Trump succeeds in getting US MNCs to pull down the shutters here and go home, or that a change to our corporation tax rate has the same result.

“We certainly need to explain the benefits of our corporation tax more because there is no logical reason Ireland should have this massive pharma base here, and it’s a credit to the foresight of previous governments that we have, because it’s not like we have some natural resource that would account for it,” she says.

Our main resource is in fact our people. Unfortunately, despite government backed initiatives to “double our doctorates” in recent years, the number of PhD candidates coming through the system has plateaued. In a way the country has become a victim of its own success as the economy has recovered.

"The overall jobs market is a big influence on PhD numbers. That is particularly the case in the ICT sector – it is hard to stay on in college with a small stipend when faced with the level of opportunities that are currently available in the jobs market, so for us it's about selling the long-term vision of where a PhD can take you in your career", says Ruth Freeman, director of strategy and communications at Science Foundation Ireland.

There is also some scope to boost the number of PhD levels by recruiting candidates from overseas. Such people bring with them not just brain power (and educational revenue) but linkages with their home market that can be leveraged, particularly by the indigenous SME sector.

Brexit may open up some opportunities to attract talented researcher from the UK who wish to work in an EU country. “Researchers are mobile and will go where the funding is but the flip side of that is that the UK has announced its commitment to putting massive funding into science,” says Freeman.

Another option is to encourage women, long the subject of a “leaky pipeline” that sees them leaving academia the higher up they go, to stay on or come back.

The Athena Swan Charter initiative can help. It is a UK based but internationally recognised quality mark for gender equality in academia that was extended to Ireland in 2014. At the end of last year the Irish Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland and the Health Research Board announced that higher education institutions will be required to have attained a bronze institutional Athena Swan award by the end of 2019 and a silver one by the end of 2023 in order to be eligible for research funding.

The move will promote gender equality in researcher careers and the gender dimension in research content, which are also key requirements for winning European Horizon 2020 research funding.

Finding ways to encourage women to remain in research is key. “It’s not showing any favouritism, all funding applications are judged on their merits, but it’s about nudging the universities to look harder for women,” she says.