UCL was established in 1826 to open up education in England for the first time to students of any race, class or religion. Its founding principles of academic excellence and research aimed at addressing real-world problems, inform the university’s ethos to this day.
More than 6,000 academic and research staff are dedicated to research and teaching of the highest standards. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 29 former academics and graduates and UCL ranks consistently amongst the most-cited universities in the world.
As London’s Global University, UCL has the opportunity and the obligation to use the breadth of its intellectual expertise to help resolve some of the world’s major problems. We are seizing this opportunity to develop an innovative cross-disciplinary research agenda, which will enable us to understand and address significant issues in their full complexity. Our vision extends beyond the common understanding of what a university is; we aim not just to generate knowledge, but to deliver a culture of wisdom – that is, an academic environment committed to the judicious application of knowledge for the good of humanity.
In Hinduism Lord Brahma is the creator, Lord Vishnu is the preserver, and Lord Shiva is the destroyer and transformer. Here are rich models for contemporary leaders, whether they were raised in the Hindu…
Every few years the ideals of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city utopia are resurrected in an attempt by the UK government to create new communities, and address the country’s housing crisis. Sometimes this…
It’s that time of the year again. One of the biggest events in Europe’s (and the world’s) cultural calendar, the Eurovision song contest is legendary. The attention paid to this bizarre show is enormous…
Surprisingly for such a universal experience, pain is profoundly misrepresented by common myths about what it is and what it means. These are rooted in dualistic models: the body as a simple machine and…
In the summer of 2010 as England was being knocked out of the World Cup in South Africa, something all together more hopeful was happening in London. A group of scientists, social researchers, parents…
Given that the IPCC now considers that climate change is “unequivocal”, that human influence is “95-100%” likely to be the dominant cause, and that its effects are already being felt around world, it is…
It seems an anomaly that among the 15 autonomous, specialised agencies within the United Nations – such as the FAO, WMO, WHO, or UNESCO – there is no dedicated environmental organisation. This secondary…
Med City was launched to great fanfare last week by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Bringing together the powerhouses of academic and clinical research at UCL, Imperial, Kings, Oxford and Cambridge…
The number of endangered bird species is rising and even with our best intentions, there isn’t enough money to save them all – so how do we decide which species we should let go? A new approach has been…
The UK is one of only a handful of countries that has put in place legally binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, relative to 1990 levels. How the country intends to go about…
It’s getting hot in the city, and our overheated cities are only going to get hotter still as more people pile in and development and energy use intensifies. But planting away the problem could be a surprisingly…
The HS2 project survives. Despite ferocious attacks, the initial High Speed Rail (Preparation) Act 2013 was passed in November and the Hybrid Bill – where the real arguments are debated – is now going…
In The Importance of Teaching white paper in 2010, the government committed itself to developing a “self-improving system of schools”. Four years on there is a risk that a two-tier system will emerge in…
C.P. Snow’s pessimistic view of “two cultures” – the arts and the sciences at war with each other, glowering across no man’s land, entrenched in their embattled fortress of true expression (as each saw…
In the past, when infections were the dominant form of disease and death, and humans didn’t understand how they spread, an epidemic ended when enough people had died that there were no more potential victims…
Influenza infection is very common – about one in five of us are infected each year. But, surprisingly, the majority of infections don’t cause any illness. In a study published in The Lancet Respiratory…
Let’s say Martians land on the Earth and wish to understand more about humans. Someone hands them a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare and says: “When you understand what’s in there, you will understand…
When residents from the tiny town of Bulga won a three-year court battle to stop Rio Tinto expanding an open-cut coalmine beside them, it was hailed as a victory for David over Goliath. Yet the type of…
A new app is about to come on the market with promises to dramatically increase the speed at which you read. Spritz is a text streaming technology that allows you to read a sentence, one word at a time…
Senior Associate Fellow on the Middle East at RUSI; Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations; Deputy Director of the Centre on US Politics, UCL