Imperial College launches new Academic Strategy to deliver transformative impact and provide world-class education

The Academic Strategy will provide a cohesive direction for the College to focus its activity, build partnerships and uncover new opportunities.

The new strategy will help Imperial realise its ambition to deliver transformative impact for societal benefit on a global scale and to provide a world-class education for our students.

The Academic Strategy will build on excellence in core disciplinary expertise by identifying and enabling opportunities that reach across departments and faculties.

Imperial’s Provost, Professor Ian Walmsley, led on the development of the strategy, alongside colleagues from faculties and departments.

“The strategy draws on our ground-breaking fundamental research, our creativity, imagination and ability to develop new insights and knowledge to help make sustainable change and improve our world,” he said.

“It identifies areas which are fruitful for new discovery, that open doors to new technologies and enable applications that could have major human, physical and economic impact.

“And it sets out our vision for an improved student experience that will prepare our students to lead, innovate and drive change.”

Current excellence and emerging focus

The strategy lays out four themes which bring together research, education and translation activity across Imperial’s faculties. These themes identify areas of current excellence and emerging intellectual focus, as well as opportunities to build new strengths:

• Sustainable society: helping society to become more sustainable by transforming manufacturing, attitudes to consumption and economic practices.
• Healthy society: innovating new technologies and strategies to improve health services and support the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease.
• Smart society: enabling discoveries and developing new technologies in artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, data sciences and robotics.
• Resilient society: developing understanding and technologies to enable stable and robust infrastructures that underpin the delivery of services.

The strategy also outlines four capabilities that enable our excellence in research, education and translation: transdisciplinary, quantitative, entrepreneurial, and engaged.

Educating future generations

Integral to the strategy is a focus on education and Imperial’s aim to offer the same high-quality experience to all students. It sets out how we will ensure that learning and teaching innovations and developments are implemented in the context of their broader student experience, responding to changing needs in areas such as curricular and extra-curricular activities, wellbeing, community, and support services.

The ambition is to provide a student experience that is inclusive, outward looking and responsive to a diverse student body, so that all Imperial students can thrive, regardless of their background.