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To me, research, in some senses,
embodies what we are as human beings.
We have this innate curiosity which we can't suppress.
We want to know what is beyond the cave,
what is over the next hill, what is across that river,
what is across the ocean.
And research is perhaps a formal way of describing
that innate curiosity and excitement.
Well, research in a university is absolutely critical.
You can't teach people at university level if you aren't there
and working beyond it yourself.
We're certainly well-known around the world,
and possibly on a couple of other planets,
for our expertise in the sciences,
and the particular expertise we've developed in planetary exploration.
I build scientific instruments and I send them into space.
I suppose I'm fundamentally interested in the origin
and the evolution of our solar system.
What I do is try to understand how volcanoes work.
I try to understand what happens before a volcano erupts,
because, obviously, that's quite important for the people who live nearby,
and it's important for the environmental consequences.
We have ignition and lift-off.
Our Delta 2 rocket clearing NASA on an odyssey back to Mars.
One of the instruments that we developed here at the Open University,
for the Beagle Project that went to Mars, was what is called a Mass Spectrometer.
That's an instrument that analyses with great precision the composition of,
in this case the atmosphere of Mars.
And what we had to do was shrink it to make it about the size of a shoebox
and to make it extremely rugged.
Now, it turns out that an instrument like that,
developed for Mars has potential for very practical uses on Earth.
Research for research sake is clearly very exciting to academics,
but we're funded to undertake research
which adds value to society and economy.
And, in fact, we're working with funding at the moment
to develop this instrument for detecting tuberculosis,
which, of course, is one of the great killers in the world today,
with our instrument,
there is the possibility that you can use it, in the field,
to do an analysis on the spot,
and look for the tell-tale signs of tuberculosis.
That has enormous implications.
What we seek to do is align projects that are benefit to the mission
and purpose of the university, with those charitable bodies
and organisations prepared to invest research funds.
Many of the potentially nastiest volcanoes
are in the poorest parts of the world.
And what I would like to see is affordable volcano monitoring for these countries.
And I think that's something that we can start to deliver.
We've got strands of research
which are all about understanding the human condition.
And given that we're the Open University,
it wouldn't come as a surprise
that it's the human condition in the context of cognition and learning.
We've just completed a major international project around citizenship
that was funded by the European Union.
And that very important project is now informing policy across Europe.
I think the difference that we can offer here at the OU,
when we're teaching science,
is that we're not only teaching about the research that we do here
or what's going on elsewhere,
we use those researchers from wherever they happen to be in the world,
and they're able to contribute to our curriculum here.
So, it's science without borders.
In a standard class in an ordinary university,
a class of students might be 30, it might even be a hundred,
but it would never be five thousand.
And in our science foundation course, we have five thousand students a year.
So, that means that we can have five thousand independent observations,
which is simply not obtainable anywhere else.
The research material does go straight into the course materials.
It generates an intellectual environment in which teaching also will flourish.
Iceland, one of the wildest and bleakest places on the planet.
We recruit students to undertake higher research degrees,
and we're recruiting them competitively
from major international research centres,
because they recognise that we have a research portfolio which, itself,
is an exemplar of excellence.
If you have high quality research, I think that, inevitably,
it tends to attract the highest quality of staff.
Very good people are attracted by an environment
in which they can be at the forefront of a cutting edge of research
on an international scale.
Open Research Online is a research repository
into which we place all our research outputs.
When we first launched it,
we started counting how many countries had tried to log in
and look at our research papers.
What we now do is count how many haven't.
So, in a year,
we've shown that our research has a place
in the international community of research,
and we're very proud of that and we anticipate continued success with that.