Professor Colin Scott

Colin Scott

“I joined UCD in April 2006 partly for family reasons – my wife was offered a teaching position here – and partly because there was a great opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary research and teaching in the field of EU Regulation and Governance.

“I came from the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the LSE – of which I’m still a research associate – and I’d previously been at the other leading centre in the world, the Regulatory Institutes Network (RegNet) at the Australian National University in Canberra.

“EU Regulation and Governance are quite underdeveloped in Ireland but there is lots of activity to investigate and plenty of potential collaborators to work with.

“I engage with virtually all parts of UCD on various research projects. For example, I have joined an interdisciplinary research team, led by Dr Niamh Hardiman in the School of Politics, which has been given a large grant by the Irish Research Council for Humanities & Social Sciences to map out the Irish State and examine why various central State bodies flourished and then died out.

“Another exciting project is a comparative research study I’m undertaking jointly with Strathclyde University on the management of the risks associated with the liabilities of public authorities. In particular, we want to understand how the management of risk might cut across the responsibility of local authorities to provide good quality social services.

“On the teaching side, I’m director of the doctoral programme in the School of Law. I teach the core module on Advanced Research Methods in Law and, reflecting my interdisciplinary mission, I also teach a module for Public Policy students at doctoral level across the university called Theory and Methods of Rules and Rule-making.

“The best thing about UCD is that it’s incredibly ambitious and I’ve no doubt researchers benefit from being in such an environment. The most interesting questions are often at the intersection of disciplines and the challenge UCD has set itself – quite rightly in my view – is to foster interdisciplinary engagement, tackling major themes right across the university.

“It takes a while to build up links with other faculties and groups. I’m not yet in the position I was at LSE, where I was at the heart of a large and successful research community but my expectation is that I will be; that in future there will be lots of interdisciplinary activity in terms of research degrees and major research projects.”