You and Queen Mary University of London: Value via collaboration 

Queen Mary University of London has a long, proud and distinctive history built on four remarkable institutions – the London Hospital Medical College, St Bartholomew’s Medical College, Westfield College and Queen Mary College – that date back to 1785.

Queen Mary also has a history of uniting diverse ideas from around the globe with its strong academic excellence to achieve remarkable innovation. In the highly regarded QS World Universities Rankings for 2021, Queen Mary is 19^th among UK universities and in the top 10 percentile internationally.

With global engagement a driving force, Queen Mary unites staff and students from over 160 nationalities on campuses in London, China, France, Greece, and Malta, making it one of the world’s most diverse higher education institutions.

Queen Mary hosts vibrant hubs – physical and virtual – that support its academic strengths and commitment to solving societal challenges, including global health and inequalities, digital environment, ethics and governance, and work in the creative industries.

An institution that opens doors to opportunity, thanks to both education and research, Queen Mary is recognised for a number of University Centres of Excellence and University Networks.

The university’s leading national and international research strengths span across wide-ranging disciplines from law, medicine, drama, and engineering.

Through the formation of the interdisciplinary University Research Institutes, Centres and Networks, the university aspires to bring for scholars from different disciplines to work together to address the major challenges facing society.

Queen Mary is a major contributor to London’s diverse artistic and cultural landscape. The university’s partnerships and contribution to the local arts is underpinned by a commitment to social justice.

The university also spearheads the People’s Palace Projects (PPP), an initiative designed to transform lives through the arts. This independent charity, founded in 1996 brings artists, activists, academics, and audiences together for projects that tackle a wide range of social justice and human rights issues.

The university’s research in the field of bioengineering also led to the discovery of the QM-Emulate Organs-on-Chips Centre. The centre provides access for researchers to develop organ models of their design to expedite their experiments and offers collaboration opportunities with Emulate.

Queen Mary Bioenterprises Innovation Centre, enabling commercial technology transfer

Queen Mary is a leading research-intensive university, ranked fifth in the UK for quality of research output, and ranked third in the world for research citations in medicine, as listed in the QS World University Rankings 2019.

The university leads on commercial technology transfer and has a proven record of success as a science incubator. Its QMB Innovation Centre is a vast 39,000 square foot premium laboratory and research space located in Whitechapel, East London.

The centre is the largest of its kind in London — an ideal location not only for life science, clinical, environmental, clean-tech and nanotechnology companies looking to expand, but also for start-up and later-stage businesses seeking an entrepreneurial base for laboratory and commercial work.

Located close to the City of London financial district and its excellent transport links, the centre offers flexible laboratory spaces for a variety of projects and scientific approaches. Its fully customisable commercial laboratories support both biology and chemistry work, able to accommodate almost any equipment.

The centre facilitates commercial and laboratory work with its laboratory and write-up space, fitted laboratories to biosafety level 2 and capacity for microbiological safety cabinets and chemistry fume cupboards.

The state-of-the-art innovation centre also offers communal facilities, including access to meeting rooms and networking facilities, a 120-seat lecture theatre and a large boardroom.

Queen Mary’s Centre for Digital Music: Championing the use of technology in creative media

Queen Mary is a leader in digital innovation in the creative media space: qMedia, the University’s large-scale, interdisciplinary research centre, hosts world-class facilities for media, arts, and technology. Its Centre for Digital Music is a top quality multidisciplinary research group in music and audio technology in the UK and a pathway for artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative industries.

The centre is at the helm of UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI and Music (AIM), a leading PhD research programme focused on collaborating with industry partners in music, audio technology and creative industries.

University/Industry research partnerships achieve breakthroughs in education

Queen Mary research partnerships focus on new uses of artificial intelligence in game design, with a research team connected with the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI), the world’s largest PhD research programme for game development.

IGGI students based at Queen Mary undertake a four-year PhD focused on developing cutting-edge research in collaboration with industry and social partners including Sony Interactive Entertainment, Bossa Studios, Microsoft Research and Women in Games.

Students spend at least eight weeks working with industry partners to tackle real-world challenges, bringing their expert knowledge to projects and, in turn, increasing the impact of their research.

Queen Mary University’s Institute of Applied Data Science hosts leading researchers in various science and technology fields. Expertise at the institute ranges from pioneering computer vision science to emerging technology related to medical decision making.

A new physical University Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI) is due to open in autumn 2020. Located adjacent to the University’s Incubator, DERI sits in an unparalleled ecosystem for digital and data science.

DERI will bring together research leaders from across humanities and social sciences, medicine and dentistry, and science and engineering, to drive new multi-disciplinary research and increase commercial interactions with key businesses.

Queen Mary is also home to Genomics England and has built strong partnerships with key industry players, including Barts NHS Trust and 46 Alan Turing Fellows.

Among the many successes of Queen Mary’s research collaborations is the transformation of the life of haemophiliac Jake Omer, thanks to a gene therapy trial. In his words:

“At 23, I struggled to run 100 metres to catch a bus; now at 29, I am walking two miles every day which I just could not have done before having the gene therapy treatment.
It is incredible to now hope that I can play with my kids, kick a ball around, and climb trees well into my kids’ teenage years and beyond.”

DERI aims to develop new lines of multidisciplinary research to continue changing lives and the world around us for the better.

Queen Mary epitomises the “Place” agenda and plays a pivotal role in serving its community 

Together, the University’s work, achievements and commitment to social justice and community propel it to the forefront of digital technology, helping local businesses close the innovation gap with digital transformation.

One example is its recent co-founding of the UK’s new national Civic University Network, which will allow universities to share and develop best practices around civic engagement.

The University is also the first to receive the Gold Engage Watermark award by the NCCPE (National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement) in recognition of its support for public engagement.  

Research at Queen Mary provided evidence for the UK’s real Living Wage campaign. In 2006, Queen Mary became the first UK university to be Living Wage accredited, committed to making support available to each of its more than 120,000 members of staff and working students.

The University is strongly committed to its neighbourhood, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes in London. It set up the  QM Legal Advice Centre to provide pro-bono legal advice to local people and businesses, and also QConsult, an award-winning employability programme that places –free – QM Students into mini consultancy projects within London-based businesses and charities.

In 2019/20, Queen Mary became the first UK university to launch a social change degree, the BSc in Chartered Manager Degree Apprenticeship for Social Change. It pairs students with leading charities, for example WaterAid and Alzheimer’s Society. More than 500 students applied for its 13 places.