Aberdeen University launches bid to attract ‘world’s finest minds’

ONE of Scotland’s oldest universities has announced ambitious plans to recruit up to 100 leading academics in its drive to be ranked among the world’s intellectual powerhouses.

Aberdeen University principal Ian Diamond said he would pay “competitive salaries” to attract world class talent and said that the institution’s newly built facilities such as new libraries, medical blocks and research centres would help with the recruitment drive.

Leading academics at the university in the Granite City have previously included the late Professor Paul Wilkinson, Britain’s foremost authority on terrorism, and Scottish historian and author Tom Devine.

The recruitment drive has been launched to attract the “world’s finest minds” to the North-east of Scotland as part of the institution’s “Come Here, Shape the Future” strategy.

Prof Diamond first vowed to make the institution compete with the “best in the world” two years ago when he took over as campus head from Professor Sir Duncan Rice.

The university would not identify individuals it hoped to recruit, but said the new academic appointments were likely to cover fields such as energy law, finance, economics, geophysics, engineering, as well as posts at the university’s Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health.

Prof Diamond said the institution had “real strength” but said that it wanted to boost key areas of its work by taking on more senior figures from the academic world.

He said: “I am delighted that we are in a position to invest in attracting even more of the best scholars to the University of Aberdeen. This is another positive step forward in our ambition to raise us in the ranks of the world’s top universities.

“Our whole message is that we offer competitive salaries, great facilities and great colleagues as part of a vision for how we will take forward the university.

“We have fabulous research and environmental studies and a brilliant team in mathematical biology, which is as good as it gets in that area.

“The university also has fantastic skills in music, a new library, wonderful energy facility and a new building for medical science.

“We have real strength in these areas and are wanting to add to this by bringing in new recruits some of who will be senior lecturers and some of who will be junior lecturers.”

However, senior Tory MSP Alex Johnstone, whose represents the city in the Scottish Parliament, said that recruiting other leading figures would not come “cheaply” as he called on the university in “oil rich Aberdeen” to pay “appropriate salaries” to attract new big names.

“For Aberdeen to achieve this laudable objective it needs to be in a position to offer the appropriate salary package to attract the best in the world,” he said.

“Aberdeen has considerable oil wealth so it should be able to achieve that, but I can only hope that there’s a change to the rules in place that limit the ability of universities to maximise their incomes.”