• Question: Who do you work for, as in who pays your salary? And do you work for an independent research company, or a big company that employs lots of people in lots of different departments?

    Asked by astroaaron to Ben, Jony, Mark on 24 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 24 Nov 2011:

      hi astroaaron,

      So I work for Diamond Light Source Ltd. Which is a not for profit compny, and joint owned by 2 groups, The Main stakeholder (86%) is STFC which is government funded. and the other 14% comes from the Wellcome Trust which is a charity.

      Diamond is a big facility, and employs around 400 people, of which about 200 are scientists, 130 are engineers and about 70 are CEO division, which covers HR, finance, purchasing, communications etc. We all work together to make sure that the facility as a whole works and keeps producing world class research.

      Hope this answers the question

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 24 Nov 2011:

      I work for a University (Queen Mary, University of London) but my salary comes from a research grant that my boss got from the European Union – complicated.

      There are quite a few people in the Physics department and I don’t know how many, a few 100’s, employed throughout the University.

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 24 Nov 2011:

      I’m paid by Imperial College London. Imperial is huge – we’ve got over 3000 research and academic staff, with departments in pretty much every science and engineering discipline.

      Imperial itself gets most of its money from the goverment, both through research grants, which people like me apply for, and from funding for teaching students (which is linked to the number of students we have).

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