Imperial Role Models

The project

This project is about collecting and presenting diverse stories from our Imperial community. We want to know who inspires our community, including personal role models like teachers and family members, contemporary scientists and engineers from around the world, or historical figures who still have an impact on you today.

We are doing this for two reasons:

1. To highlight the diverse stories of people who inspire our community.
2. To build a database of STEMM stories that can be used to diversify and expand our teaching.

Get Involved

We are collecting stories from the whole Imperial community, from staff and students. Please share your stories with us. You can tell us about yourself and why this story is important to you or you can share anonymously if you prefer. We will be hosting a community event on the 24th of June where we hope to share the stories from across our community.

View our role models for some ideas.

• Katie’s role models – Alan Turing and a former colleague
• Linda’s role models – Wang Zenyi and her grandmother

Then click on the link below to share yours!

Share your role models here

What is a role model?

The simple answer

The term role model is actually very hard to be define but for this project we mean it in the broadest sense possible. We want stories of:

• The people that you think the Imperial community needs to know more about. Like Wang Zhenyi.
• The people whose stories have inspired you or made you think. Like Henrietta Lacks.
• The people that you want to emulate. Like Katie Piatt.

The academic answer

There is no consensus on one definition of a role model but in the literature, role models have been linked to:

• Showing the behaviour a person would like to copy or emulate (Merton, 1968).
• Modelling career ambitions (Jung, 1986).
• To show what is possible and be a source of inspiration (Morgenroth et al. 2015).
• Aspirational positions in society (Horsburgh and Ippolito, 2018).

These role models can fall into two categories. Accessible, which are those you have a personal connection to, and inaccessible, which are public or historical figures (Bird, Kuhns and Garofalo 2012).

Who we are