PPAN2009 Prioritization Exercise

Ruth GregoryPPAN

December 2009

Prioritization Process• Advisory Panels set up July 2009, consultation exercise

over summer, panels reported to PPAN in September.• PPAN first prioritized new projects using a uniform set of

criteria developed in consultation with PPAN and PALS• The new projects were then interleaved with the previous

main prioritization from the 07/08 Programmatic Review giving a coarse grained ranking.

• Financial information was included in the Nov/Dec meeting, and a ranking constructed also considering breadth of program and a focus on individual areas.

The alphas

International Subscriptions

• Balance between program and International Subscriptions was first examined, flat cashing of the subscriptions was required to make progress. (Apart from exceptional contributions to ESO.)

Key Results• It was barely possible to support even 5 projects within

the financial envelope. Therefore necessary to administer some cuts across the board.

• Higher ranked projects were cut 10-15%, lower ranked projects more.

• Big ticket items were considered in detail separately by area to re-profile and try to apply cuts intelligently.

• The program was then re-merged and cuts applied to the rest of the projects.

• We tried to preserve as much as possible of the future, consistent with capitalizing on existing investment.

Implications for Particle Theory

• Consistent with the 10% cut in grants, the grants round will receive further cuts, however, no current grant will be pulled (apart from IPPP which will be renegotiated).

• RA posts will be dangerously low, BUT, the picture is bleaker in other areas.

• CERN is still top priority, theory has been unanimously highly supported across the community in both PP and Astronomy.

• Studentship and Fellowships main other direct cut.

Studentships and Fellowships

• S&F cost 25M per year, it was necessary to apply cuts. • As no cuts had been applied in the previous PR, we

decided to recommend a cut commensurate with the but to grants in 07/08 at 25%.

• This was felt to be unsatisfactory, but necessary and appropriate.

New PPAN projects unable to support

ANITA, Accelerator R&D for CLIC, Clover Follow-On, CCAT, COMET, CTA, Detector R&D, ELENA, Einstein Telescope, ISOL at SPIRAL2, JPARC neutrino upgrades, LHCb upgrades, LHeC, UK involvement in LSST, NUSTAR additional contributions, MoonLITE, MROI, NA62 at CERN, Next Generation Dark Matter experiment, NG1df, Panda, SNO+, Super B factory