Ian Chapman, who transformed the United Kingdom’s fusion research in the wake of Brexit, has been picked as the next chief executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). It is the country’s largest public research funder with an annual budget of £9 billion.
When he takes up the role in June, Chapman will immediately have to grapple with a government spending review that is expected to leave the agency’s budget flat for years to come as the U.K. economy falters.
“I’ve heard good things about him,” says Alicia Greated, executive director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, an advocacy group. Chapman’s experience revitalizing the country’s fusion sector will come in handy as the government leans on growth to pull the U.K. economy out of a slump. Chapman’s “challenge, and the opportunity, are almost the same thing,” Greated says.
A physicist, Chapman has spent much of his career at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy working on tokamaks, huge doughnut-shaped fusion reactors such as the EU-backed Joint European Torus (JET)—sited at Culham—and the global ITER project, under construction in France.
In 2016, a few months after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union, Chapman was appointed as CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), which manages the Culham lab. Although the U.K. government decided, years later, to remain a part of the EU research program Horizon Europe, it opted out of its nuclear equivalent, Euratom, cutting off Culham staff from European colleagues and removing the U.K. from ITER.
In his time leading UKAEA, Chapman oversaw the shuttering of JET and turned Culham around from its previous focus on Europe to collaborating with commercial fusion startups and initiating its own project to build a prototype fusion power plant called the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP). In January, the government announced £410 million in funding for fusion, including development of STEP and committed to building a demonstration plant to supply electricity to the grid in the early 2040s.
Chapman—who will succeed Ottoline Leyser, a plant biologist who has led the agency since 2020—will need those political skills as he takes the helm of UKRI. The agency’s budget for 2025–26 is expected to be at most flat with no inflation increase. There have been reports that large facilities such as the Diamond synchrotron Light Source may have their funding cut. Similar belt tightening is expected in the government’s 5-year spending review, which is released in June.
“Research and innovation must be central to the prosperity of our society and our economy, so UKRI can shape the future of the country,” Chapman said today in a statement.
Chapman will need to “bring the sector together to speak with a strong united voice,” Greated says. “We have to demonstrate the critical role of R&D towards growth. We need the right language.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-scientist-named-chief-u-k-s-national-funding-agency
