While Dr Brian Harvey has helped to secure for UCC the highest PRTLI funding in the past decade, he is under no illusion about the efforts still to be made. Anne Byrne reports

Two weeks after Professor Brian Harvey was appointed vice-president for research at UCC in 1999, the Higher Education Authority (HEA) announced that it would be providing the largest funding programme ever for research in third-level institutions in the State. This funding wopetitive basis.

Harvey immediuld be made available on a comately began to appraise UCC's form and to groom the college for success. Three rounds of funding later, and UCC has become the highest research earner of Irish universities for the past decade - a regional university with international aspirations.

Although he was the college's first vice-president for research, Harvey says he was starting from a sound base. "UCC had, and still has, a consistent record in drawing down peer-reviewed funding, much of it international. We also have two significant research centres, the National Micro-electronics Research Centre and the National Food and Biotechnology Centre." In 1999, Professor Gerry Wrixon, the new president of UCC, began to target appointments so that research record was of paramount importance, particularly in team-leader positions. Meanwhile, Harvey had begun an audit of existing research strength, including what could be described as the State's first research- assessment exercise.

"We took a two-pronged approach. The first part was an exercise in research and innovation where we looked at staff records over the preceding five years - publications, postgraduate supervision, invited lectures, seminars, funding, letters of recommendation from peers," he explains. This was obligatory for all academic staff. Reports were then compiled and placed on an electronic database, which is updated continuously. Staff notify the research office of any new publications and, once these are verified, they are included in the record.

The second part of the exercise, called a research enhancement and achievement exercise, was forward-looking, says Harvey. Staff were asked to project five years ahead - to identify strengths and weaknesses in infrastructure, equipment, human resources and suchlike.

"These two research exercises allowed us to prioritise areas. They helped us to bring people together from various backgrounds to engage in collaborative interdisciplinary projects," he says. Then UCC took its biggest gamble, submitting very large-scale interdisciplinary projects to the HEA, rather than adopting what Harvey calls a "grapeshot approach". The gamble paid off handsomely.

Harvey says that in his first year as vice-president, he went "walkabout", meeting all of the faculty deans. "I had an open door policy. Anyone who wanted to express an interest in PRTLI (Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions) or SFI (Science Foundaton Ireland) was welcome to come in and talk. I got very close to the researchers. Once we had prioritised proposals, we set up strategic planning groups. They had to explain to me, in layman's language, what their projects entailed. I could then understand and put them in context, so as to draw up proposals." And while all this is going on, Harvey continues his own research interests, as professor of the college's physiology department. When his four-year term as vice-president of research ends, he plans to return to the lab, where he enjoys an international reputation for his work on cystic fibrosis.

Originally from Carlow, he says his interest in science dates to age seven, when his teacher, Mr Mooney, took his class from St Joseph's primary school on nature walks and gave talks on the stars. "He stepped outside the curriculum and exposed us to the natural sciences." Later, the influence of Professor Roddy Kernan of UCD was to prove seminal. "I had done my BSc and was teaching in Kilbarrack while doing my H.Dip. Professor Kernan saw me wandering around the UCD campus and asked me why I was wasting my time. He hauled me back into research, on to a PhD programme.

"I was his last PhD student and he really threw me in at the deep end.

"I worked on ion transport across cell membranes, biophysics. The movement of sodium, potassium and chloride ions is important in quite a number of inherited disorders. Professor Kernan introduced me to the international network. I got a global education although I was based in UCD.

"I finished my PhD and was wondering what to do next when a telegram arrived from the College de France, inviting me over there to work in the Atomic Energy Commission laboratory." After a brief period in Paris, Harvey moved to Villefranche sur Mer. "It was beautiful, on the Mediterranean. I spent 10 years there and became a director of research for the French Science Council." He was headhunted by UCC and came back to Ireland in 1993 where he established the Wellcome Trust Cell Physiology Unit.

Today, he says Ireland is still in catch-up mode when it comes to research. "The PRTLI programme is curing a historical deficit in infrastructure." He expects the next round of funding, in June, to be the last cycle. To date, UCC has appointed 500 PhD students on the basis of funding obtained from PRTLI. "This will have a knock-on effect. Hopefully, these people will not go away but will stay and become research leaders." There is a strong case for another, different type of PRTLI, he says, to allowing for continuing development.

As for the other major State funder of research, SFI, he says it has given out very little money to date and has not been tested yet. UCC gained two principal investigator awards in the first round of funding but secured sanction for four. The other two researchers did not come to Ireland in the end. Any researcher of the stature necessary to gain SFI funding will already be working with a team, and will be reluctant to leave, says Harvey.

When Ireland tries to poach established researchers, a bidding war ensues, and the lab where the researcher is resident usually has access to bigger funds, he explains. The €317 million available for biotechnology and ICT (there's a total of €635 million in SFI's coffers) would fund one unit in an institute such as the Max Planck Institute for just one year, he suggests.

The SFI Fellows Award may be pitching itself too high in its bid to attract world-class researchers to Ireland, he suggests. "I think if we really look at ourselves, we're fooling ourselves if we think we can attract a Nobel Laureate here. We're good at science but we're not that good. We have to look to our own talent, how can we progress it? We have to look to our PhD students."