Prof. Bob Webb – Research priorities
Q. The University of Nottingham has 13 research priority areas. What are they and
why has the University chosen to focus on those particular areas?
We are board base university and we have world-leading research across the whole
range of university, from art and humanities, through social sciences, engineering,
veterinary sciences and also clinical sciences at medical school. We selected these
priority groups based on a critical mass and also multi-disciplinary nature of the
research in the priority areas. And some of the key priority areas, one would easy
recognise, these are one related to energy, so ever priority group in energy, we have
one on global food security would be the major challenge over next 50 years. As a
global university that we have two international campuses, one of our priority groups
linked to globalisation and then we have other key priority groups, for example
operations in the digital world, which is looking at the utilisation of new digital
advances, which is going to have an impact on everyone, around the world as we go
forward.
Q. Another area, drug discovery that on the medical side?
Yes, we have strong, a lot of strong research going on in drug discovery and also in
synthetic chemistry. Also, interesting that it’s link to obviously some of the work going
on in our Malaysian campus, I don’t think people realise or recognise that actually in
Malaysia, in terms of biodiversity is second after Brazil. So in terms of drug discovery,
we know that a lot of compounds come out of natural products, because of the
biodiversity in Malaysia that shows you the research in Malaysia and how that links
back to the UK and makes things into strong drug discovery research in Chemistry is
going on at Nottingham.