Welcome back to the new academic year LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY Provost’s View: Welcome back to the new academic year

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY At the heart of everything we do is academic leadership and excellence. Whether it is working together to pioneer new fields of study and solve the biggest global issues facing the world today or delivering outstanding education to our students. Our aims for 2034 will build on this excellence and ensure we do all the right things to secure UCL’s position in the global top 10 for generations to come. And all the signs are that we are on the right track. Over the summer, it was great to see that UCL has joined a small handful of international higher education institutions which have been rated as global ‘stars’. New analysis of the World University Rankings by Times Higher Education identified that UCL is one of those which is ‘on the move’ due to its broadening research excellence and global reputation. One of the key drivers for the strength of our outstanding cross-disciplinary research, which is almost the lifeblood of UCL.

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY A further £40 million of investment for the Dementia Research Institute. Contributing to a state-of-the-art £250m new building to host the central hub of UK Dementia Research Institute alongside the world-class, newly renamed UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Photo credit: Matt Clayton

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY UCL East £100 million secured from government towards the capital cost of building UCL East campus on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The Mayor of London also formally launched East Bank: a new destination for London with world-class education and culture at its heart, including our UCL East campus and sites for the V&A and the Smithsonian Institution, Sadler’s Wells, BBC Music and UAL’s London College of Fashion. Finally, we have made great progress in further developing our innovative academic activities that will have a home in UCL East, led by, and bringing together, academic staff across over seven faculties. This academic planning has gone hand-in-hand with the detailed design of our buildings, and I’m excited that we are still on track to break ground next year.

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY UCL’s outstanding research is attracting donations supporting our biggest ever philanthropic giving campaign, the Campaign for UCL. To date, over £470 million has been raised to support the 2034 strategy. We reached the £470m mark a year ahead of schedule – an encouraging sign of how well the Campaign is going. Donations continue to be secured from a range of supporters, including pioneering AI company DeepMind, charities and foundations such as the Wolfson Foundation and individual philanthropists and alumni – including a major gift from a Hong Kong-based alumnus that will be announced later this year.

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY All the signs are that we are on the right track to achieving our goals.  

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY We want to make sure that all students, regardless of background, can participate fully and achieve good degrees at equal rates. New tool to help embed inclusivity  2,800 new teaching seats available New Student Centre opening in 2019 will provide 1,000 new study spaces and a central access point for student support services. 

Ambitious new strategy to accelerate our progress launching soon. LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY Equality, Diversity and Inclusion are a key priority for the year ahead. Ambitious new strategy to accelerate our progress launching soon. Our EDI team has become part of my office and I am personally committed to enacting bold changes at an individual, institutional and policy level to ensure that our values of respect and tolerance are upheld by all.

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY In order to deliver this ambitious agenda, it’s vital that we radically improve the services that we all rely upon. This includes Transforming Our Professional Services (TOPS), our programme to deliver more effective professional services to the UCL community. Priorities have included improving the timetabling and room booking process, launching Unitemps to streamline the process of recruitment for temporary job vacancies, and improving the visibility of core Professional Services activities and timelines across the institution by launching a new UCL Year Planner in advance of 2018/19.

LONDON’S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY Want to know more? For more information about these plans, or if there is something else that you would like to know more about, please contact us at: provostfeedback@ucl.ac.uk Want to know more? For more information about these plans, or if there is something else that you would like to know more about, please contact us at: provostfeedback@ucl.ac.uk