Career impact

Preparing brilliant minds for rewarding academic careers

The majority of our doctoral students go on to pursue careers in academia or research and our programme offers the teaching experience, skills training and guidance to help you achieve your career goals. Combined with the essential skills and experience, the people that you meet during your doctoral experience will be key to helping you secure your future academic placement.

Our Doctoral graduates have joined leading universities, research centres and institutions, others have sought top positions in industry or founded successful start-ups. 

In order to prepare you for an academic career, our Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) programme gives you the opportunity to develop your teaching skills, whilst making a positive contribution to the Business School’s taught programmes. After successfully completing the in-house training programme, Graduate Teaching Assistants perform a wide range of teaching duties to support the School’s Master’s programmes. These roles include leading tutorials and holding office hours for core modules, acting as tutors for online modules and module leaders for short courses such as Matlab and VBA, marking coursework and second marking exams.

The Graduate School at Imperial College London provides a comprehensive Professional Skills Development programme for doctoral students. The programme ensures you acquire basic research skills at the start of your doctoral studies and continue to develop as a well-rounded researcher, gaining the skills and experience to successfully complete your research degree and move on to an academic career. You can select from courses covering a range of areas such as literature reviews, thesis management, information management, presenting, project management, statistics, career planning and grant writing.

You will have unrivalled opportunity to make long-lasting connections that will prove invaluable in your future career. You’ll mix with fellow students, alumni, adjunct professors and visiting faculty, from across Imperial College.

Research seminars

Our research departments run seminars where internal and external academics discuss their latest work. As well as providing insights into yet-to-be-published research by top academics from around the world, the seminars offer networking opportunities and speakers often lead special topic workshops for research students.

Conference participation

The opportunity to present and share your work is an extremely important aspect of doctoral studies in order to gain valuable feedback on your research and where you can form important connections with fellow academics who specialise in your field. You will have the opportunity to present your work in research department seminars and are encouraged to submit your research for presentation at conferences. The Business School has funding available to help cover expenses associated with presenting at conferences.

Graduate placement

Our graduate placements

In recent years, our PhD students have joined leading universities, research centres and institutions such as Tsinghua University, University College London, Copenhagen Business School, the Bank of England, the University of Bath, King’s College London, National Chengchi University, the University of Sussex and Renmin University in China. Others have sought top positions in industry or founded successful start-ups.

The doctoral programme has been re-structured in recent years to focus more on academic development and it is anticipated that over the coming years placements will focus more on academia than industry.

Recent graduate placements have included:

  • Health Policy Analyst, OECD
  • Assistant Professor in Financial Technology, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  • Teaching Fellow, Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial
  • Assistant Professor of Finance, Queen Mary University London
  • Assistant Professor position at IESEG in Paris
  • Postdoc, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland
  • Research Fellow at The University of Queensland Business School Assistant Professor at NEOMA Business School Research Economist, Bank of England
  • Policy Research and Advisor, OECD
  • Lecturer in Leadership, Henley Business School, University of Reading

  • Assistant Professor of Finance, University of Amsterdam
  • Assistant Professor of Finance, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
  • Economist, Bank of England
  • Economist, Bank of Israel
  • Economist World Bank (also offered Assistant Professor of Finance- Cornell University)
  • Quantitative Risk Analyst, Citi Financial Services
  • Researcher, Mathematica

  • Assistant Professor in Finance, University of Durham
  • Assistant Professor in Finance, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research (SAFE)
  • Lecturer in Finance, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow
  • Senior Quantitative Analyst, Fitch Ratings
  • Research Economist, Bank of England
  • Teaching Fellow, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
  • Deployment Strategist, Palantir Technologies
  • Research Associate, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Judge Business School

  • Assistant Professor of Finance at Smith School of Business
  • Quantitative Scientist at Flatiron Health
  • Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Entrepreneurship at ETH Zurich
  • Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Finance at University of Mannheim
  • Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Environmental Economics at LSE

  • Assistant Professor of Finance at Alberta School of Business
  • Research Economist, Bank of England
  • Assistant Professor of Finance at Université Laval
  • Assistant Professor of Finance at Skema Business School
  • Assistant Professor of Finance at Trulaske College of Business
  • Assistant Professor of Financial Management at IESE Business School
  • Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Design Fashion Marketing, University of Leeds
  • Research Economist, Organisation Development and Research Ltd.
  • Research Associate, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Imperial College Business School

What our students say

“An academic career requires not only critical skills and independence, but also perseverance. Once a student has gone through a PhD journey, they are equipped to handle various types of situations. I plan to use these skills gained during my doctoral programme at Imperial to further develop my independent research projects, to collaborate with international researchers, and to mentor and supervise my own future PhD students.”
Ruxandra Luca
Doctoral alumna
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