Michele Dougherty grilled by MPs on “catastrophic” impact of cuts on early career physicists

The withdrawal of funding for a major project at Cern will “weaken” the UK’s international standing in physics, the leader of the Science and Technology Facilities Council has admitted.

In January, Research Professional News revealed that that UK Research and Innovation would no longer provide funds promised for an upgrade to a detector at the Large Hadron Collider—currently the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider—called the LHCb.

Michele Dougherty (pictured), executive chair of STFC, was pressed on the impact of the decision by MPs on the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on 4 March, saying “it does weaken our [international] standing, certainly”.

“What it doesn’t do is undermine our subscription to Cern—we are the second-largest partner,” she added. Without UK funds, the future of the LHCb upgrade is in doubt and the withdrawal has angered collaborators overseas.

Modelling cuts

STFC is also having to make decisions on where to impose cuts to research grants and the facilities it supports, with costs predicted to outstrip its budget by £162 million over the next four years.

In January, Dougherty wrote to the particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics (PPAN) community saying the grants programme was expected to see a budget cut of around 15 per cent in 2026-27, building on a cut of 15 per cent the year before.

But Dougherty told MPs that as part of an ongoing prioritisation exercise, the council would model cuts of 10, 20 and 30 per cent to the PPAN programme. She promised that STFC will engage with the community before presenting options to UKRI, having earlier stressed that she was a member of the physics community so “was feeling the pain”.

MPs pressed her on whether transitional money could be made available, expressing incredulity that the UK’s R&D budget was rising but that STFC was having to impose cuts and suggesting money could be found elsewhere.

Mulling structural changes

Dougherty indicated the decisions were not hers to make and that despite having previously been on STFC’s council, she was not aware until starting as executive chair in January 2025 that there was a shortfall in the region of £100m-£150m, adding it was “not what I signed up to”.

She said she wanted to look at the structure of STFC funding to prevent the grants budget from being eroded by spending on international subscriptions and science facilities.

“What I would like to do is have an open and honest conversation about where PPAN grants sit,” she said.

Dougherty said she had been having conversations with the science department about removing international subscriptions from STFC’s budget, as well as potentially moving the grants programme to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council—echoing comments made by the science minister Patrick Vallance the day before.

Actions for ECRs

Earlier in the session, Simon Williams, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Durham, said that for this year the situation for early career researchers in theoretical physics “was almost too late to fix”. He questioned why there had not been consultation with the community before changes were announced, adding that “the uncertainty that has been injected into the system has been catastrophic”.

Williams, who co-authored an open letter to Vallance about the plight of early career researchers affected by the cuts, said “we have essentially no STFC consolidated grant-funded postdocs beginning this year” and said that mechanisms should be put in plans to “salvage the ECRs in this country”.

There has been widespread concern that the cuts will fall most heavily on ECRs, with cuts already implemented by STFC seeing opportunities drop off sharply in 2026-27.

Williams said the impact of cuts on ECRs would be “catastrophic for UK science”, characterising it as “killing the tree by removing the roots”.

Dougherty said that after meeting ECRs, STFC would be “looking at the impacts of the cuts that we are going to make on ECRs across the UK and how long it would take to then get numbers back up”.

She had previously said that in two years’ time, the funding situation will become brighter for physicists. But Jon Butterworth, professor of physics at University College London, warned that by then it would be too late.

Asked if the UK would be able to pick things up later, Butterworth said: “This is such good science…[that] we would probably try to get back in there, but we would not be leading it anymore.”