• We will ensure Government, Parliament and other key decision-makers understand what conditions world-leading science needs to thrive.
• We will raise the profile of Imperial research through strategic communications aligned to the new Academic Strategy and bringing key stakeholders to the College.
• We will provide strategic support to our researchers to provide evidence to policy-makers through The Forum programme.
• We will teach our students how to engage the public with their research, creating dialogue which informs learning and increases the impact of what we do.
• We will work to set national and global scientific agendas through connecting our thought leaders to decision-makers and contributing to all stages of policy development.

The Forum

The Forum is Imperial’s policy engagement programme. It connects Imperial researchers with policy-makers to discover new thinking on global challenges. Launched officially by current Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance in July 2019, The Forum supports our researchers to better engage with policy-makers and helps policy-makers develop relationships with Imperial researchers working in subject areas relevant to their work to support evidence-based policy development.

The Forum builds internal capacity through internal policy engagement seminars and regular communications on opportunities such as calls for evidence, events and secondments. Our workshops bringing together Imperial researchers and policy-makers are focussed on global challenges such as AI and data, sustainability and climate change and ageing societies – reflecting the priorities of Imperial’s new Academic Strategy.

The Forum is already influencing policy debates. Last year Imperial’s Computational Privacy Group, led by Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye – who took part in a Forum workshop on data privacy – persuaded the government to make changes to the Data Protection Bill in 2017, making the case for alterations to plans to criminalise re-identification from anonymised data sets.