As we look ahead to the new academic year, I wanted to reflect on our research and the outstanding work taking place across our University.
The publication of our REF results in May was a real moment of celebration. Our performance cemented our status as one of the best research-intensive universities in the UK – ranked joint 7th for the quality of our research, with 92% of our research assessed as internationally excellent or world-leading. You can find out more in our news story.
At the beginning of August we formally launched our Research Highways: five pioneering research themes, through which we will address local and global challenges and help our external partners and collaborators better understand where we have real and distinctive research excellence. We also created some fantastic new material to bring our Research Highways to life, showcasing our research excellence and the global impact of our work. Please do check this out on our webpages, which we are continuing to update at pace.
A few months earlier on 25 March, we formally launched the Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI), the first of our University Research Institutes, with an event in which an expert panel explored Queen Mary’s role in supporting the UK Government’s National AI Strategy. You can read more in our news story.
Sticking with DERI, we are delighted to welcome Professor David Leslie into our key role of Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society. Professor Leslie is currently Director of Ethics and Responsible Innovation Research at The Alan Turing Institute. The appointment will both strengthen our already solid relationship with the Turing Institute and further develop our expertise in the vital consideration of the moral and ethical implications of emerging technologies.
I am also delighted to welcome Professor Claudia Langenberg as the inaugural director of the Precision Health University Research Institute (PHURI). Claudia is a world-renowned researcher, who joins us from previous roles at the Berlin Institute of Health, Charité and the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. As Director of PHURI, Claudia will lead the development of an ambitious programme of research, which builds on existing research excellence and our longstanding partnership with Barts NHS Trust, to drive a global step change in precision medicine from east London. We will share more information about the PHURI in the coming weeks.
In HSS, we have 20 new scholars joining the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences this academic year. The research of these new staff spans the changing role of the private sector in international development, the economics of education and recruitment of teachers through to the ‘geography of hunger’ and the emerging governance of masculinity in global politics.
Since February 2022, we have had over 750 new staff join us across various roles, who are attracted to the values and direction of travel of our University and the difference we are making to people’s lives, locally, nationally and internationally, through our excellent education and research.
There have been many examples of recent research successes – too many to mention here. One example that has stood out for me is the work of Professor Chloe Orkin, Dr John Thornhill and colleagues on the global outbreak of monkeypox, which identified new clinical symptoms. Their paper in the New England Journal of Medicine attracted the most attention of any paper in the world published in July 2022 according to Altmetric* and is in the top 1% of all research outputs Altmetric has ever tracked. Most importantly, the work has contributed to the World Health Organization (WHO) updating their monkeypox case definition to include these new symptoms, a process which Chloe was invited to be part of. She is now a member of WHO clinical expert group for monkeypox.
Seeing the tangible and vital policy impact of this research in the space of a few weeks has been incredible. Chloe’s activism to ensure that the new case definitions were adopted by international public health agencies was covered in an article that appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Congratulations to Chloe and colleagues. You can read more in our news story and Chloe’s article for The Conversation.
Congratulations also to Dr Caroline Roney and Dr Christopher Chen, who have been awarded Future Leaders Fellowships to tackle irregular heart rhythms and explore turbulence in space plasma, respectively. They were among only 84 academics across the UK to be awarded these fellowships, demonstrating how highly these colleagues are regarded, the importance of their work and the scale of their ambition.
Last but certainly not least, I wanted to introduce a new piece of work on research culture being led by our V-P (Research and Innovation) Professor Andrew Livingston. It is vital that we have an environment at Queen Mary that enables our entire research community to thrive, excel and produce world-leading research. Andrew and his team are therefore looking to work with researchers at all career stages, and Professional Services colleagues who support research, to explore the research culture we currently have and what we want it to be, to ensure that we produce excellent research. This ‘listening exercise’ will feed into the development of tangible actions we can take to make the most of our strengths and ensure we are building the research culture that is right for us as a research-intensive world-leading University. Please do look out for more information and sign up to take part.
Professor Colin Bailey, CBE, FREng, BEng, PhD, CEng, FICE, FIStructE, MIFireEPresident and Principal