Vision for Medicine

White City skyline

Our vision for medicine at Imperial is to attract the world’s brightest academics and teach the world’s most able students in modern, advanced technical and physical environments.

Medical science now enjoys a distinctive environment at Imperial. It reaps extraordinary benefits from being well embedded within a wider ecosystem of excellent fundamental science at the College and working translationally with an AHSC network of NHS partners.

In recent years, new opportunities have been catalysed across the College by the development of the White City Campus, including through exploiting its adjacency to the Hammersmith Campus – offering exciting prospects for an emerging life sciences cluster in west London.

Our Faculty of Medicine aims to foster the most effective academic, clinical research and education environments possible, across its campuses. Alongside its partners, it will enable and support the continued evolution of Imperial as an international powerhouse of medical education, research and innovation.

Vision for Medicine

Telling our science story

Opportunities sown by the 1997 merger that formed what is now the Faculty of Medicine are now truly bearing fruit. The Faculty continues to enjoy great success in attracting external funding for major, interdisciplinary and translational programmes.

Such examples highlight the compelling story our Faculty is able to tell about the collaborations between medicine and our outstanding colleagues in engineering, business, physical and life sciences across Imperial. Similar opportunities exist across many health areas, such as nutrition, antimicrobial resistance and vaccine development.

Supporting our scientists

In the late summer of 2018, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine launched a year-long process to reorganise the Faculty into eight academic departments. Due to come into effect from 1 August 2019, this reorganisation aims to underpin our activities and programmes with a more thematic structure that showcases the outstanding scientific strengths across our organisation and facilitates broad academic engagement with Faculty strategy and decision-making.

The Faculty of Medicine is immensely proud that all of its departments hold an Athena SWAN award. This recognises and celebrates good practices in higher education and research institutions towards the advancement of gender equality: representation, progression and success for all.

Delivering brilliant courses

Over the coming years, the Faculty will deliver on the promise of the College-wide as the core of Medicine’s academic mission. From 19/20, this will see the implementation of outcomes from curriculum reviews of the Faculty’s MBBS degree and postgraduate taught portfolio. Through innovating our curricula and approaches we aim to ensure we equip our students with everything they need to be at the forefront of their fields, whether they choose a medical or scientific career.

The launch this year of our online Global Master of Public Health is indicative of the Faculty’s ambition to prepare its staff and students for an increasingly digital future. Educational developments will continue to provide new opportunities for Faculty staff to drive its education mission, re-iterating a fundamental commitment to research-based teaching.

World-class academic spaces

The on-going development of Imperial’s campuses will be a critical factor in how the Faculty is able to maximise its strengths across the organisation. We want to exploit fully the multidisciplinary, inter-Faculty and translational opportunities that now offer themselves both at South Kensington and at our Hammersmith/White City campus, and to foster the most effective clinical research and education environments possible, across our hospital campuses.

2020 will see the first groups from Medicine and Engineering move into the Michael Uren Biomedical Engineering Research Hub. They will join College colleagues already building their research in the Molecular Sciences Research Hub, maintaining momentum in the rapid growth of Imperial’s new innovation-oriented campus for bioscience.

The coming years will see further developments in west London, including state-of-the-art new facilities for Imperial’s School of Public Health and the MRC London Institute for Medical Sciences.

In July 2019 the College announced a timely opportunity to sell the St Mary’s Medical School Building, which would be an important step in fulfilling the vision for the Faculty of Medicine. Work is currently underway to liaise with colleagues across our Faculty of Medicine community to plan for this process.