Staff, students and external partners gathered to celebrate the development of the strategy and look ahead to its implementation.

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

It lays out four themes which bring together research, education and translation activity across Imperial’s faculties: sustainable society, healthy society, smart society, and resilient society. 

The strategy will focus efforts to increase fundamental understanding and develop new discoveries, to generate new technologies and applications that will impact society, to create new educational experiences and improve the learning environment for students, and to reflect how Imperial staff and students want to be as a community.

Imperial’s Provost, Professor Ian Walmsley, spoke at the event. He said: “The frontiers of knowledge are expanding – we are sending missions to Mars, building artificial cells that mimic nature, and gathering data at a new scale. New opportunities arise every day as technology advances, and we are more connected with the world than ever before.

“Building on a great foundation of world leading research and education, the new Academic Strategy spurs us to go even further to push the frontiers of discovery, transformative innovation and education.”

The president of Imperial’s students’ union, Abhijay Sood, spoke about the role students will play in the implementation of the strategy. He said: “We welcome the commitment from College to work with students as partners: student reps have already been involved in the various working groups and we expect this to continue as the strategy is developed further. We also welcome the commitment from the College to the holistic student experience: aligning its decision-making on academic and non-academic matters around a common set of strategic objectives, and working collaboratively to improve things for us.”

A number of proposals are currently being assessed and developed into detailed business cases through the Academic Strategy prioritisation process. Successful projects will be announced in spring 2020.