Imperial Role Models

The project

This project is about collecting and presenting diverse stories from our Imperial community. We want to know who inspires you, be they personal role models like teachers and family members, contemporary scientists from around the world who you admire, or historical figures who still have an impact on you and your work.

We are doing this for two reasons.

1. To highlight the diverse stories of people who inspire our community
2. To collect a database of STEMM stories that can be used to diversify and expand our teaching

Get Involved

You can get involved with this project as we are collecting stories from the whole Imperial community, staff and students. Please share your stories with us. You can tell us about yourself and why this story is important to you or you can share anonymously if you prefer.

Click on the links to the right to see some examples that we have already collected from the community. Then click on the link below to share yours!

We will be hosting a community event on the 24^th of June where we hope to share the stories from across our community and we will be sharing all of the stories via our webpages.

Follow this link to submit your stories (coming soon).

What is a role model?

The simple answer

The term role model is actually very hard to be define but for this project we mean it in the broadest sense possible. We want stories of;

• The people that you want to emulate. Like Katie Piatt
• The people whose stories have inspired you or made you think. Like Henrietta Lacks
• The people that you think the Imperial community needs to know more about. Like Wang Zhenyi

The academic answer

There is no consensus on the definition of a role model but in the literature, role models have been linked to:

• Showing the behaviour a person would like to copy or emulate (Merton, 1968)
• Modelling career ambitions (Jung, 1986)
• Aspirational positions in society (Horsburgh and Ippolito, 2018)
• People who inspire and motivate (Ahn et al., 2020)

These role models can fall into two categories. Accessible, or those you have a personal connection to, and inaccessible, public or historical figures (Bird, Kuhns and Garofalo, 2012).

Who we are