President's Address 2025

Good afternoon, everyone. Colleagues, students, alumni of Imperial and all of Imperial’s collaborators and friends.

Welcome and thank you for joining me today.

Imperial’s founding mission, as I never get tired of saying, is “to be useful”. It was written into our royal charter of 1907 and it’s what drives us today.

In 2025 “being useful” in the UK means, more than anything, growing the economy. As the Prime Minister wrote in The Times last week, growth is the “only cure” for “the disease of stagnation and decline". So today I want to talk to you about what we can do to help, as an institution, as a sector and, ultimately, as a country.

How can we harness the power of science and technology to make the UK a more prosperous and more equitable place?

Now I’m sure there are some among you, perhaps of a certain age, who are already hearing echoes of Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” speech in Scarborough where he promised to “harness” the “white heat” of science and technology to “forge” a new Britain in 1963. And perhaps you’re even thinking yes, that’s exactly what we did.

In the 62 years since Wilson gave that speech the UK’s universities and science and tech companies have given us: test tube babies, CT scanners, Dolly the sheep, MRI, the Higgs-Boson prediction, gravitational waves, neutron scattering, Graphene, pulsars, off-shore wind farms and the first Covid vaccine.

The United Kingdom is home to only 0.8% of the world’s population but produces 13% of the world’s most highly cited papers, and I’m proud to say that Imperial, with its unique mix of science, engineering, medicine and business, sits at the very heart of this success story.

Modern Britain has harnessed the “white heat” of science. We are a world-leader in AI, we are a world-leader in electronics, we are a world-leader in aerospace and a world-leader in medicine, and that has made us a more prosperous country.

Last year, the science and technology sectors contributed £164 billion to the UK economy. That’s the equivalent of an entire year of NHS England funding. But the truth is that it’s nowhere near what it could be. What you may not know about the “white heat” speech is that Wilson based it on a lecture he gave here, eight months earlier, just a fortnight after he was elected Labour leader. Standing at a lectern like this at Imperial, Wilson said the biggest barrier to British science was our “appalling complacency". We were the nation of Newton, Darwin, Lovelace, Fleming and Kelvin but, to quote, we did “not give science its proper place in our national life". And sixty-two years later, we have made huge progress, but we still have more to do.

The UK invests about 3% of our GDP into R&D. In Germany, whose economy is as sluggish as ours, they are targeting 3.5%. The OECD reports that China has been increasing its R&D investment by 10-14% a year, and the US invests ten times as much as we do: $200 billion dollars a year. Our 3% is a sign that we need to do more.

Now, government spending on R&D has risen in recent years, but that increase has failed to keep pace with inflation and we’re falling  behind our competitors. As Rachel Reeves said in Oxford last week, the UK is “at the forefront of some of the most exciting developments in the world." We could be one of the world’s great science and tech superpowers. The chancellor is right “we can do much better”.

This government’s commitment to over £20 billion R&D investment in their first budget last year was a very welcome start. “Research on a shoestring”, Wilson said, is a threat to the UK’s “national survival”, and investment, as Rachel Reeves says, “is the lifeblood of growth”. But the UK is small. And our finances are challenged. We will never outspend the US or China.

So in order to compete on a global scale for the talent, ideas and capital we need to “kickstart growth”, we need to play smart, to be strategic and to direct investment where it will make the biggest difference. And here, the UK’s universities are among our greatest assets.

Imperial was ranked 2^nd in the world this year in the QS World University Rankings, where we were joined in the top ten by three other UK universities. There are fifteen of us in the global top hundred and we deliver an impressive return on investment. Universities UK estimates that for every pound of public money invested in higher education, the sector puts fourteen pounds back into the national economy.

The launch of the government’s new Industrial Strategy this spring is the perfect opportunity to set out a long-term, national strategy to harness our universities to drive economic growth.

It must begin with a laser-like focus on the UK’s STEM talent pipeline. Research shows that skills and labour have been the only factor of the UK economy to have made a positive and consistent contribution to productivity growth in the UK since 2007. That’s mainly been thanks to our increasing number of graduates, and the effect is especially clear in science and technology.

But the UK’s supply of excellent STEM graduates is under threat. Not enough young people in our schools are taking STEM subjects at A level. Current UK undergraduate tuition fees don’t cover the cost of expensive STEM courses. Undergraduate biosciences enrollments have fallen by 15% in five years across the country and some chemistry departments are closing because they can’t cover costs. We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to these trends.

While international students have long helped offset these shortfalls, their numbers are also falling precipitously across the sector. That poses a triple threat:

Fewer fee-paying international students that enrich our learning environment, help power our research and cross-subsidise costly STEM courses, fewer international founders driving high-growth UK businesses, and fewer skilled graduates for our industrial base.

At Imperial, we are doing our best to reverse things.

Imperial Maths School in North London is giving gifted local teenagers from a wide range of backgrounds access to excellent science and maths A-Level teaching.

We continue to expand our STEM portfolio at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in line with demand from industry.

A new engineering and business undergraduate programme is in the pipeline.

And we’re launching a major new initiative, the Imperial Institute of Extended Learning, to provide transformational STEM upskilling for industry.

But universities simply cannot do this alone.  If we are to compete internationally we need a system-wide response to address the crisis in maths and science education in our schools. We must address the Higher Education funding system to cover the costs of a STEM education, and the government’s upcoming immigration white paper must make it even easier for us to attract and retain highly skilled people – both international students and researchers.

The Chancellor was right when she said “we’re in an international competition for talent”. When it comes to attracting researchers, we are still very much in the game. The UK is home to some of the world’s greatest research scientists, engineers and clinicians and many of them are here at Imperial. If she wants to experience “the sounds and sights of the future arriving”, like she said, the Chancellor need only pay them a visit at South Kensington, White City, Silwood Park or our NHS campuses.

At the Imperial Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein, they’re protecting the future food supply.

At the Mucosal Immunity in Human Coronavirus Challenge programme, they’re preparing for future pandemics.

And at our AI-4-Health Centre for Doctoral Training, they’re developing solutions to the world’s biggest challenges in healthcare.

But the UK should not take its scientists for granted. In order to attract and retain world-leading researchers and in order to enable them to do their best work the Industrial Strategy must recommit to excellence-based research funding and get the funding mix right.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the UK research funding model, we operate a ‘dual support’ model. One pillar of project-specific grants awarded through discipline-focused competition by UK Research and Innovation and a second pillar of strategic institutional funding, of which Quality-related Research, or QR Funding is the largest stream. QR funding is a research block grant universities receive annually on the basis of a national assessment of research quality that’s done every seven years, the Research Excellence Framework (or REF).

Believe me, QR is the envy of our international competitors,  I know, I used to be one of those competitors. It gives UK scientists the stability and flexibility they need to take risks, to try new things and test new ideas,  and it gives universities the funding to make strategic investments in new technologies and facilities.

Imperial receives around £58 million of QR funding a year.

It supports our Molecular Sciences Research Hub: one of the most advanced molecular science facilities in the world.

It supports the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub, whose research produced the first self-amplifying RNA vaccines for Covid.

It paid for a Faraday Cage at the Centre for Cryo-Microscopy of Materials: a unique facility for testing environmentally sensitive materials.

Investments like these are the foundations of the whole science sector. We simply do not know where the next great scientific discovery will come from. Remember, it was here at Imperial, in 1928, that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident while studying influenza.

So why am I concerned?

Because QR funding has fallen by 16% in real terms since 2010. This threatens the very foundations of British science. And I appreciate that, when finances are tight, it might seem harder to justify QR funding than targeted research into, say, a cure for cancer. But there is ample evidence that the UK’s current strengths,  in areas such as biosciences, vaccine development, engineering biology, cleantech and quantum,  can in large part be explained by the flexibility QR funding gives researchers. QR funding produces genuine discoveries. Discoveries become technologies and products, these become businesses, and businesses are the engine of growth.

The Industrial Strategy can also unleash the full potential of universities as powerful catalysts for innovation and growth within regions and across the UK. I see this potential writ large every time I’m on Imperial’s White City Deep Tech Campus:

A cauldron of leading edge multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and convergence science in AI, Engineering Biology, HealthTech, drug discovery and environmental research.

A hotbed of start-up and scale-up activity, including our dedicated facility for scale ups, ScaleSpace, a partnership with venture builder Blenheim Chalcot.

Crowding in private investment and commercial partners such as Agilent and Bruntwood SciTech and serving as a magnet for SMEs and big corporates within the wider White City Innovation District.

This success is built on a strong foundation of trust, collaboration and co-creation with citizens, community groups and local government and enabled by modest, but hugely impactful government funding through the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF).

The success of our White City Campus has been the inspiration to go further through the creation of the Imperial West Tech Corridor, connecting and leveraging world-class innovation assets at Paddington Basin, South Kensington, White City, Silwood Park and Old Oak and Park Royal. If we replicate the recent growth of the White City Innovation District across the WestTech Corridor, we will add 150,000 new jobs to London’s economy in just five years.

There are also clusters of innovation all over the UK in high-growth industries with universities at their very heart and with huge upside potential:

Biotech along the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor

Quantum computing in Glasgow.

Advanced materials in the North West.

The Industrial Strategy is an opportunity to build and network these vibrant innovation clusters, and surely it’s time to stopping pitting regions against one another.

As a relatively recent arrival to the UK, I found it puzzling, to put it mildly, to hear the strength of London and the wider ‘Golden Triangle’ (of London, Oxford and Cambridge) portrayed as a problem. To the rest of the world, the “Golden Triangle” is one of the world’s strongest research and innovation brands, and potentially one of the most attractive assets the UK has for foreign direct investment.

Let’s use the Industrial Strategy as an opportunity to reshape the narrative. How can we leverage the strengths of the Golden Triangle and network it to other innovation clusters to create a vibrant UK innovation ecosystem that’s competitive with the very best in the world?

Because the benefits of growth don’t stop at city limits. Startups born at Imperial are opening manufacturing plants in Middlesbrough, Leeds, Coventry and further afield.

Our AI Superconnector brings together complementary AI innovation expertise from Imperial and the Universities of York, Leeds and Liverpool.

We’re partnering with the University of Cumbria on a new medical school in Carlisle.

It’s time we stopped pitting regions and institutions against each other and pooled our strengths.

The Connected Capabilities Fund is one example of how modest funding can be used to network regional clusters. Why not build on funding schemes that have been shown to deliver when time is not on our side?

And pooling strengths should include our international partners.

I’ve been talking throughout this speech about “competition”, and while growing our science sector is a national endeavour, the truth is that science is a collaborative effort. Global problems, whether they be climate change, food security or antimicrobial resistance, require global solutions.

But international research collaboration can also deliver economic dividends, building greater research scale, impact and commercialization opportunities, bridging innovation ecosystems to create bidirectional flow of ideas, talent and capital, and, over time, helping pave the way for trade deals and access to new markets.

We have an opportunity to build greater collaboration between the UK universities and partners around the world, both academic and corporate, but at the very moment when global cooperation is most necessary, UK funding for international research collaboration has stalled or been cut back. The loss of the Global Challenges Research Fund has weakened the UK’s ability to lead on these issues.

Investing more in the International Science Partnerships Fund would not only help bridge this gap but also serve as a welcome statement of intent. Reaffirming the UK’s commitment to global scientific collaboration and leadership in addressing the world’s most pressing challenges.

At Imperial, we have not been deterred.

We are launching Global Hubs in San Francisco, Singapore, Bengaluru and Ghana to strengthen science diplomacy, build research collaboration, and create new opportunities for UK-led innovation.

The Industrial Strategy should build on this work. It should signal the importance of ongoing involvement in Horizon Europe and its successor programme, and it’s an opportunity to establish new bilateral funding schemes with the US, India, Japan, and South Korea, where even modest funding has the potential to unlock significant flows of international capital.

If there’s one thing I want you to take away today it’s just how strong a position the UK is in already. There are headwinds facing the sector, of course, but we can navigate them. Our universities are a gold mine of research, expertise and vibrant ideas. We are well-equipped to face the world’s greatest challenges head-on: climate change, AI ethics, pandemic resilience, these are questions we have been working on already for decades.

So I am going to end my address today with an answer to the Chancellor’s recent call to go “further and faster” to “kickstart growth".

My answer to the government is this: we’re ready.

We’re ready at Imperial.

We’re ready as a sector.

Ready to produce the best ideas. The best graduates. The best research. The best companies. The best ecosystems.

We’re ready to make Britain a science and tech superpower.

Universities want “to be useful”. So use us.

Thank you.

Professor Hugh Brady

President, Imperial College London