Exeter seeks 60 staff to beef up strengths for RAE

Exeter University has begun a £3 million recruitment drive to hire 60 academic staff to build research strength for the next research assessment exercise.

Some posts will be located at Exeter's new Cornwall campus in Falmouth, shortly to undergo expansion work part-funded with European Union money. It has already attracted five Royal Society research fellows.

The first appointments, advertised in The Times Higher this week, will be 13 new chairs in disciplines Exeter considers to be its strongest: biosciences, climate systems, geography, management, education, French, Spanish and animal behaviour. The university expects to fill chairs in biochemistry, microbiology and systems biology with people who will bring research teams with them.

The Met Office, which moved to Exeter two years ago, has agreed to sponsor the chair in climate systems.

More advertisements will appear in The Times Higher in the next two weeks to fill 47 lectureships. The university ran an internal competition for its schools to nominate areas of strength that could be improved with new staff.

Paul Webley, Exeter's senior deputy vice-chancellor, said: "We already have an astonishing amount of high-quality research. We submitted 85 per cent of staff in the last RAE, and we aim to submit about 96 per cent in the next.

"This latest round of recruitment is all to do with making sure we maintain the highest quality across the board so that we can achieve that," he said.