Over the past few decades, UK universities and other higher education institutions have been subject to an assessment of their research quality through something called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and more recently the Research Excellence Framework (REF). When I got an academic job at the University of Sheffield in 2008, it was probably because my last name is Rae and the year was 2008 and they thought I'd be good for their RAE2008 profile. Anyway, I left my academic job a couple o...
