Thank you to academic and professional services colleagues for their input during our Staff Town Hall on shaping emerging themes of academic opportunity last week.
Staff contributed to ongoing conversations about 15 emerging opportunity areas under seven draft themes during a networking and poster session. The audience also heard insight from the panel and their reflections on staff questions.
The collaborative conversations were led by Professor Paola Lettieri, Vice-Provost (Strategy), Professor Geraint Rees, Vice-Provost (RIGE) and Professor Ibrahim Abubakar, Pro-Provost (Health). Professor of Healthcare Engineering, Rebecca Shipley chaired the discussions, with Dr Michael Spence, President & Provost, giving the event’s closing remarks in Logan Hall on 23 June.
The Academic Ambition and Health Strategy conversations are university-wide conversations drawing on staff expertise about how we maintain and build our academic excellence beyond the next 10-20 years. In dialogue with our community, we aim to identify academic opportunities with the greatest potential for development and investment that will create impact at scale.
These early discussions and emerging ideas will help us as we work towards developing the next UCL Strategy, starting in 2027.
The emerging academic opportunity draft themes identified through faculty-wide conversations over the last 12 months are:
- Advanced Manufacturing
- Clean Energy
- Creative and Cultural Industries
- Data and AI
- Humanities and Social Sciences
- Quantum
- Space
The emerging opportunity areas for the Health Strategy are:
- Computational Healthcare
- Engineering Biology and Therapeutics
- Interception
- Brain Cancer
- School of Nursing and AHP
- Dental School
- Health Consultancy
- Executive Education
Give your feedback
This is not a settled list and the Strategy and Health teams are keen to get further feedback, including from those who were unable to attend the event. You can share your insights, comments and questions about these academic opportunities via our online form (UCL password required), which will be live until the end of September.Posters, leaflets and recordings from the event
Academic Strategy SharePoint to view the posters and leaflets that were on display, as well as links to recordings of the main panel presentation, the Q&A session and the Provost’s closing remarks.During the event, the following were discussed:
- Realising UCL’s academic goals
- UCL’s size and shape and managing it through investment and planning
- What the academic ambition and the health strategies are not
- How we find and develop the opportunity areas
- Internal and external drivers
- How the health strategy will span all 11 faculties
- Emerging opportunity areas for the health strategy
- Funding and investment for the emerging areas
- Drawing on multi-disciplinary strengths
Next steps
You can find further information, including answers to the questions submitted to the Town Hall, and posters and leaflets about the opportunity areas, on the Academic Ambition Sharepoint site.Reflection and feedback on the emerging opportunity areas are welcomed over the summer, and in the autumn term each area will be refined based on this insight and through further engagement with the UCL community.
End of year community celebration event
There is still time to sign up for our end of year celebration and town hall event on 8 July, where there will be updates on our Brand, UCL200 and Philanthropic Campaigns. Lunch will be provided at this all-staff event, which will explore how we reflect the excellence and identity of UCL and work to engage our key audiences. You can sign up to the end of year Staff Town Hall here.- University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
