Collaboration

Medics

We will strengthen collaboration with business, academia, and non-profit, healthcare and government institutions across the globe

Imperial is a global academic community where people from different cultures contribute diverse perspectives, new ideas and fresh approaches to solving complex problems. Working with partners not only helps us solve problems together, it helps us to create impact for societal and economic benefit. Our global reach is spreading further than ever with collaborations or projects in 192 countries, establishing partnerships to tackle global challenges in areas such as healthcare, engineering, technology and sustainability. 

We will support the internationally collaborative creativity and initiative of our individual academics and faculties to establish new innovative global relationships with businesses, universities, governments and international organisations, throughout the world, enabling Imperial to have a positive global impact on society by solving real-world problems.

In action

Actions in detail

  • We will celebrate our international values and community.
  • We will strengthen the support available to our College community to find appropriate partners and establish valuable and impactful collaborations, and underpin this through our ethical principles of engagement.
  • We will utilise our convening power to create-multi-sector partnerships across academia, industry, government and civil society to deliver transformational research, education and innovation.
  • We will seek closer and deeper relationships with our innovation partners, finding new ways to collaborate and to drive positive real-world outcomes.
  • We will create platforms for research, capacity-building and knowledge exchange to achieve social and economic goals, including tackling the UN Sustainable Development Goals (for example, through our partnership with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences).
  • We will offer opportunities for students to benefit and learn from external partnerships.

Case study

Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine

Imperial has partnered with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore to create the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. This was the College’s first ever overseas initiative where we have established an entirely new organisation awarding a joint Imperial/NTU degree. Established in 2010, the first students graduated as doctors in 2018 under an entirely new and innovative curriculum focussed on team-based learning and the new doctors have been enthusiastically received by the hospitals in the Singapore Healthcare Group. We have built up an expanding portfolio of collaborative research with LKC in the fields of epidemiology and public health, neuroscience and infectious diseases.

Academic Health Science Centre

Close partnership with the NHS is critical to delivering our world-class medical education and to translating our discovery science into the clinic for the benefit of patients and the population. In 2007, Imperial created the UK’s first Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (comprising St Mary’s, Hammersmith, Charing Cross, Western Eye and Queen Charlotte’s hospitals). The AHSC has now grown to embrace the two specialist post-graduate hospitals in West London – the Royal Brompton and the Royal Marsden, together with the Institute of Cancer Research; most recently, the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital joined the AHSC in 2020. The AHSC has now allowed us to develop an aligned strategy between academia and our partner NHS providers for research, education and clinical service.

Technical University of Munich

TUM is Germany’s leading technological university. The TUM-Imperial Joint Doctoral Academy unites a new generation of PhD-level innovators to focus on building new London-Munich education and research partnerships in the triangle of AI-Healthcare-Robotics. The cohorts have access to world-leading academic supervisors and state-of-the art facilities at both institutions to work across artificial intelligence, healthcare and robotics - fields where both Imperial and TUM have taken a global lead in research, innovation and breaking down disciplinary boundaries.