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Panel 13 – PHYSICS / MATHEMATICS
4. Lund Observatory
4.1 Introduction
The Lund Observatory staff is relatively small, 12 FTE researchers, with
half the total at professorial level. Income is dominated by contributions
from “Government Faculty” and “Grants for Research”, with undergraduate-related
income just 10% of the total. From the information
provided, the Observatory apparently no longer maintains a traditional
observational programme employing its own facilities. Such an approach
is the norm for many small research departments and the staff have access
to world-class optical/infrared facilities through Sweden’s membership
of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Nordic Optical
Telescope (NOT).
Within Europe, many larger astronomical departments/observatories
maintain significant national facilities, or, now, more commonly, are
involved in development and construction of instrumentation for major
international telescopes and satellites operated by organisations such as
ESO and the European Space Agency (ESA). Within the last two decades
there has also been a growth in the number of relatively small astronomical
groups/departments. Such new groups have generally combined the
acknowledged benefit of i) providing “astro”-elements to the teaching
of physical sciences at undergraduate level, often within a larger physics
department, with, ii) the ability of active astronomical researchers to
secure research funding from national science research council sources.
Often, the research focus is one of exploitation of data provided by
international and national facilities through the (relatively) modest level
of funding required to cover postdoctoral researchers and Ph.D. students
along with departmental overheads. Given the absence of any significant
experimental programme, such a funding model has proved viable in
many universities.
Lund Observatory is relatively small but does not have access to a government-funded
source of funds for exploitation research that is adequate to
employ postdoctoral researchers. Neither does the Observatory possess
the scale, or the funding, necessary to provide a significant contribution
to major international instrumentation projects. Thus, there is a difficulty
of positioning the Observatory’s research activity in order to make a substantial
international impact. A recent positive development has been the
success of the Observatory in attracting European Union (EU) –funded
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