The Decadal Plan for Australian Physics 2012-2021. (December 10, 2012)

Last week Australian Physics "launched" its Physics Decadal Plan 2012-2021: Building on Excellence in Physics at the Australian Academy of Science's Shine Dome.

The Plan was prepared by a Working Group tasked by the Academy’s National Committee for Physics and chaired by Professor David Jamieson of the University of Melbourne. It consists of two documents:

1. Physics Decadal Plan 2012-2021: Building on Excellence in Physics-Underpinning Australia’s Future (80pages)
   Contains a summary of the findings of the physics decadal plan process and provides the main recommendations for addressing the current issues identified within Australia’s physics community.
    

2. Physics Decadal Plan 2012-2021 Research Report (253 pages)
   Contains the background and foreground research from which the findings presented in the Physics Decadal Plan 2012-2021 have been drawn. The data in the Physics Decadal Plan 2012-2021 Research Report can also be used for benchmarking future changes in this field.

Overall the plan makes 9 major recommendations. The plan and its implementation will be presented to the physics community at the AIP Congress at the University of New South Wales in Sydney next Tuesday 11th December from 12:30-13:30.

RECOMMENDED ACTIONS AND PATHWAYS

 a) Quality teaching — quality students

• Establish a scholarship scheme to encourage excellent physics graduates into a secondary education teaching career.

• Consult to ensure the physics component of the national curriculum is founded on rigorous analytical and quantitative reasoning, and encompasses the fundamentals of physics; and develop a formal process to second physicists to serve on panels developing the curriculum.

• Require that secondary school teachers are trained in physics to three years above the highest level at which they are required to teach physics. This corresponds to first-year university physics for years 7–10 teachers and a major in physics for years 11–12 teachers.

• Endorse an undergraduate science degree together with a teaching qualification as the preferred qualification option for years 7–12 physics teachers.

• Require science education training as an integral part of the teacher training for future primary school teachers.

• Resource universities to provide programs that up-skill and update school physics teachers as part of their professional development. This should include resources for secondary school physics teachers to take sabbatical leave to participate in undergraduate teaching programs within the university sector.

• Introduce options for science, mathematics and physics teachers to allow them to study part-time for a teaching MSc.

• Continue ongoing support for the development and implementation of the Australian Academy of Science’s primary school program Primary Connections and its junior secondary school program Science by Doing. These award-winning approaches to professional learning and school curriculum resources have been shown to have a positive impact on the quality and quantity of science taught in schools.

• Encourage school programs such as Scientists in Schools, STELR 2, Science and Engineering Challenge 3 and SPICE 4 that promote contemporary quality school science learning.

• Reward excellence in physics teaching. A panel of leading teachers should be convened to identify the best process, perhaps under the auspices of the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) Education Convener.

• Introduce teaching bursaries to support students interested in teaching physics to gain qualifications.

• Start public campaigns to raise the status of teaching as a profession, modelled on the successful Victorian State Government campaign.

• Establish a joint-academies taskforce to harness the strengths of e-learning in tertiary institutions with a view to developing the next generation of teaching technologies jointly across the sector. This will include the establishment of a competitive teaching and learning scheme to aid in the transformation of education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and the development of metrics to evaluate STEM education.

• Identify and address the underlying causes of the under-representation of girls in physics at all levels of school education.

• Promote the spectrum of available career paths to students to enable them to make informed decisions about career choices.

• Provide career advisory services particularly for school students (but also university undergraduates and graduates) so they can make informed choices about future career pathways, such as teaching, research, government or industry employment.

b) Internationally competitive Australian physics undergraduate and postgraduate students

• Broker agreements between Australian higher education providers to ensure that the Australian physics PhD is comparable in the breadth, depth and duration of training to those in the USA and the EU, particularly by providing the resources for the inclusion of postgraduate coursework as a key component for higher degree by research training.

• Merge the Australian postgraduate award scholarships scheme with the international postgraduate research scholarship scheme to open up the scholarship pool to all domestic and international students.

• Provide a balance of learning experiences between theoretical, experimental, observational and computational physics to ensure employment readiness of graduates not only for research but also for industry and business. This will include a process for consultation with key employers.

c) Valuing and promoting physics

• Commit resources from the higher education and research sectors to support high-quality outreach programs with long-term impact that can reach and engage Australians.

• Develop programs and commit resources to promote the value of physics and physics education and careers to school students, parents, industry, universities and government bodies.

• Ensure the National Mathematics and Science Education and Industry Adviser located within the Office of the Chief Scientist works with the physics community to address physics-specific challenges.

d) Equitable career pathways and removing disadvantage

• Provide equitable access to career opportunities by consistently enforcing research opportunity and performance evidence guidelines in assessing candidates for research positions and for internal and grant funding.

• Implement initiatives to recruit, retain and promote women and create an environment in which all staff can achieve their maximum potential.

• Reassess the standard performance metrics upon which career progression largely depends.

• Improve the academic preparedness of prospective Indigenous students; and improve personal and financial support once enrolled.

• Develop alternative pathways into higher education for Indigenous students

• Reassess conditions for travel support. In the case of the ARC Future Fellowship Scheme (and its successors) the restrictions on non-fellow travel support are recommended to be lifted. At present restricting travel support only to the fellow discriminates against fellows who cannot travel because of carer responsibilities. Allowing fellows to use their ARC travel funds to support visits of key collaborators who will advance the cause of the project will remove this discrimination.

e) Partnerships between industry and academia

• Provide joint postdoctoral (as opposed to PhD) positions in industry, jointly funded by government, university and industry.

• Develop a ‘Physics in Industry’ model for constructive and lasting relationships between industry, business and the higher education sector based on the successful ‘Mathematics in Industry Group’ run by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) 5. This could be done by the Australian Institute of Physics and the Australian Academy of Science National Committee for Physics.

• Develop models for facilitating cross-sector mobility between higher education institutions, government research agencies and industry and business. This includes developing mechanisms and metrics that facilitate entrepreneurialism and commercialisation of research within research organisations without penalising career prospects.

• Convene, under the leadership of government, a summit or workshop with the aim of developing an understanding of mutual expectations of government, industry and academia, and to develop more effective modes of interaction and collaboration.

• Better manage intellectual property held by academic institutions.

• Improve understanding by physics researchers of factors affecting businesses (such as shareholder and customer demands).

f) The power of cross-disciplinary research

• Encourage the participation of physics in interdisciplinary consortia to address problems of national importance by encouraging research funding programs to aggregate critical mass without discipline restrictions.

• Develop schemes that support large, coordinated multidisciplinary teams and ambitious research projects.

g) Efficient, agile, fair and sustainable research funding

• Minimise the administrative burden and make efficient funding agency processes by streamlining the ARC grant application process, with consideration of moving to a two-stage ‘white paper’ system.

• Simplify funding schemes that support physics research, including a simplified process for grant renewal beyond the initial three years for projects of demonstrated significant achievement.

• Collaborate with the major funding agencies to improve agility of the funding process to enable responsiveness to international research opportunities, some of which arise at short notice, by the introduction of a new international collaborative research scheme.

• Ensure that there are funding schemes to support large collaborative centres of excellence in physics funded adequately at the top end of discipline funding. Physics research in areas of global and technological importance specifically requires large interdisciplinary teams to make an international impact.

h) Infrastructure investment to remain at the cutting edge

• Provide ongoing funding for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) process to support major national physics infrastructure upgrades and operational costs, including the provision of qualified support staff.

• Broaden the ARC definition of ‘infrastructure’ to accommodate the non-physical infrastructure, critical for theoretical and mathematical physicists.

• Establish a ‘Landmark Funding Scheme’ to support participation in major international research initiatives (the order of $100 million or greater) that fall outside the scope of current funding schemes.

• Develop a system to allow small to medium enterprise to access supercomputers to bypass the cumbersome prototyping phase in product development.

i) Metrics and coding for the 21st century

• Develop metrics for academic activities that are broader than those based simply on publication output and citations, including measures of interaction with industry, commercialisation and the commercial impact of applied research.

• Develop an expanded set of metrics for university staff that can be used for tracking progress and process improvements (such as equity-related activities, achieving diversity of funding, meeting milestones in attracting new talent, developing collaborative programs etc.). ARC programs, such as Linkage, already recognise this to some extent.

• Ensure that the research metrics and classifications used accurately reflect the current physics sub-disciplines and more importantly, their different publication and citation modalities.