Imperial College London

Professional quality experimental facilities, close contact with industry and talented, enthusiastic staff all contribute to the outstanding reputation of Imperial’s Department of Aeronautics.

The Department is organised into two sections: Aerodynamics and Aerostructures.

We have research expertise spanning three key fields: field mechanics; aerospace materials and structures; and computational methods and mathematical.

Our research facilities support computational and experimental projects in fluid mechanics, structural analysis, composites, optimisation and control and aircraft design.

Our experimental research is supported by well appointed laboratories and wind tunnels, with some of the equipment being unique in the UK.

The Department's professional-quality experimental facilities include a range of equipment for the manufacture of advanced fibre composites, advanced structural test rigs, and more than 10 wind tunnels from low to hypersonic speeds.

We offer a number of study options to help you take your knowledge to the next level. If you are interested in Doctoral study, it’s important to gain support for your application from your potential supervisor before making a formal application to the College.

Study in bioengineering employs fundamental methods primarily developed by natural scientists, physical scientists and engineers in order to advance understanding in biology, physiology and medicine.

The major research activities of the Department are concerned with the functioning of body systems, devising means of examining them, and providing support during therapy or surgery, as well as other technical applications.

Detailed analysis of these systems is a key factor in understanding and treating the most disabling medical conditions in a large and increasing proportion of the world’s population, such as atherosclerosis, thrombosis, osteoarthritis, bronchitis, arthritis, cancer, glaucoma, Alzheimer’s disease, and strokes.

Imperial leads the bioengineering agenda both nationally and internationally, advancing the frontiers of our knowledge in the discipline. In the REF 2021, 99 per cent of the Department’s returned research was judged either ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’.

Our staff come from diverse academic disciplines including all main branches of engineering, physical sciences, life sciences and medicine. The rich collaborative environment ensures our research benefits from both engineering rigour and clinical relevance.

The Centre for Environmental Policy (CEP) is a unique interdisciplinary Department in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College conducting policy-focused fundamental and applied research to solve environmental and sustainability issues.

We work at the interface between science/technology and policy, to understand complex scientific issues and co-create solutions for real-world environmental challenges.

Research at the CEP tackles a wide range of environmental topics with a focus on informing public policy and ensuring the commitments made by government, businesses and civil society to mitigate human impact on nature and natural resources can be upheld. Our work falls within three broad research themes:

1. Energy and Climate – research focuses on key policy challenges including climate change, energy security, affordability and energy for development.

2. Environmental Management – undertaking research that can underpin and inform decisions regarding how different aspects of the environment and its resources can be managed sustainably.

3. Human Dimensions of Environmental Change - exploring the influence of human activity on the planet's environment, and its consequences on human societies and human well-being.

The Department of Chemistry is one of the world’s leaders in both teaching and research in chemical engineering.

Our research spans six main themes:

• synthesis and catalysis
• chemical biology and healthcare
• environmental and green chemistry
• energy
• imaging, sensing and analytical chemistry
• materials and molecular design

Our skills are also central to several multidisciplinary molecular science research centres:

• the Centre for Processable Electronics
• the Institute of Chemical Biology
• the Institute for Molecular Science and Engineering
• the EPSRC UK National Service for Computational Chemistry Software

The Department has strong links with industry, reflected in generous funding for teaching and research, and extensive facilities including well-equipped research laboratories and state-of-the-art chemical instrumentation.

Students sponsored by industry spend part of their PhD training period working with their sponsor. Our former students are currently employed by companies such as Agilent Technologies, Argenta, AstraZeneca, BASF, BiFocus, BP, Dow, GlaxoSmithKline, Infineum, Lilly, Novartis, Organon, Pfizer, Roche, Syngenta and UCB CellTech.

The Department occupies the Molecular Sciences Research Hub on the College's White City Campus.

Imperial College London has an outstanding world-class reputation for both teaching and research in Chemistry.

The Department has a thriving research community which currently includes 56 academic staff, many internationally renowned in their respective fields, three Fellows of the Royal Society, 23 academic visitors, 49 postdoctoral fellows, 186 PhD students and 63 MRes students.

The quality of teaching provided has been recognised as 'excellent' by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and great emphasis is placed on providing professional training to a high level.

The Department has strong links with industry, which is reflected by generous funding of both research and teaching. Facilities are extensive, with well-equipped research laboratories and workshops for the construction of mechanical and electronic instruments.

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is the largest and most highly rated civil engineering department in the UK.

Our research involves lab, field and computer-based work in the core areas of environmental and water resources engineering, fluid mechanics, geotechnics, structures, systems and transport.

We aim to develop the understanding, tools and people needed to create and maintain sustainable natural and built environments, working on most of the major challenges facing the world today, including resilience of communities to natural and man-made extreme events, sustainable urbanisation, providing water for all, climate change mitigation/adaptation, diminishing natural resources, renewable energy, low carbon economy and extending the life of our infrastructure.

Our postgraduate studies programme has an excellent reputation both within the UK and internationally.

Our staff are leading scholars, and have close links with engineering practice through consulting work and research on industry-related problems. This combination gives the MSc courses a vocational flavour which enhances their academic strength and provides a very good basis for PhD research in related fields.

The Department also houses the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation, created to enhance the capacity of the construction industry using the application of systems engineering in the built environment.

All MSc courses within the Department are accredited by the relevant professional institutions.

Imperial's Department of Computing is one of the UK’s largest computing departments in terms of teaching and research staff.

The Department is a world leader in academic research, with over 30 research groups spanning logic and artificial intelligence, distributed software engineering, quantitative analysis and decision science, programming languages and systems and visual information processing.

We’re also involved in two cross-faculty research groups: machine learning and security.

Our teaching and research expertise is underpinned by state-of-the-art facilities and a dedicated technical support team for the Department to make sure you get the most out of the technology available to you.

The Department has a long tradition of successful relations with industry. Collaborations include research projects, consultancy, CASE awards, supervision of MSc projects, industrial placements and student sponsorship.

Design engineering represents the fusion of design thinking, engineering thinking and practice within an enterprise culture.

The new Dyson School of Design Engineering combines fantastic facilities with the creation of a new design community that draws together existing design engineering research and teaching activities from across Imperial.

The School collaborates with and receives sponsorship from major organisations including Laing O’Rourke, Rolls-Royce, NASA, CERN, the NHS and the James Dyson Foundation, whose generous £12 million donation helped found the School.

Both of our Master's degrees are delivered with the neighbouring Royal College of Art, which has its own specialist facilities and a vibrant community of artists with talents ranging from fine art to fashion, design to goldsmithing.

To ensure that our taught courses are stimulating and relevant, we constantly update our teaching to take in new research results and developments.

Our design engineering research activities have led to the creation of patents and spin out companies through Imperial's technology transfer company, Imperial Innovations.

The Department of Earth Science and Engineering straddles the interface between pure science and engineering.

Our research is focused on understanding the fundamental processes that occur on the Earth’s surface down to the planet’s deep interior, and spans three themes:

• earth and planetary science
• petroleum science and engineering
• mineral and environmental engineering

Our work contributes to an understanding of climate change at various temporal and spatial scales; we also aim to meet the challenge of reducing the environmental impact of society’s consumption of natural resources.

We’re also involved in a number of cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental research centres, such as the Grantham Institute and Energy Futures Lab.

The Department collaborates closely with the nearby Natural History Museum, and makes use of their excellent analytical facilities. In addition, we have strategic research relationships with Shell, Statoil, Sinopec, Rio Tinto and Anglo Platinum amongst others.

Our students usually find summer and permanent employment in the major oil and mining companies, as well as in software and consulting businesses; most undertake summer placements in industry to complete their research projects.

We are one of the largest departments in the UK devoted to electrical and electronic engineering, and an internationally leading research centre.

The Department has a strong commitment to conducting internationally competitive and innovative research. We were ranked top for research in electrical and electronic engineering in the REF 2021, where 99 per cent of our research was rated as either 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent'.

Our research is focused around seven themes: high performance embedded systems; biomedical research; defence and security; power; intelligent and autonomous systems; MEMS, sensors and devices; and big data.

You can study many specialised fields, and you will also be encouraged to broaden your studies by taking modules taught both within and outside the Department.

With its variety and scope, the Department attracts millions of pounds in grants and contracts each year from industry, the European Union, the UK government’s research councils including the EPSRC, and various charities. Our research leads to solutions to industrial challenges, patenting and licensing of intellectual property and the formation of spin-out companies.

The Department of Life Sciences comprises one of the largest life sciences groups in Europe.

Our outstanding reputation for research – spanning atoms to the biosphere – is underpinned by well-equipped facilities to support postgraduate research and teaching. This includes some of the most modern electron microscopes, tissue culture suites, a protein production and analysis facility, sophisticated controlled environment facilities and extensive field sites.

As a recognised centre of excellence in both training and research, we receive one of the highest levels of funding in the country. This enables us to support a large number of research groups with a diversity of research interests.

Imperial's Department of Materials is the oldest and largest of its kind in the UK.

Our courses cover the synthesis, processing, modelling and materials characterisation of a broad range of materials, with applications in such diverse fields as nuclear power, aerospace, biomedical, automotive, communications and electronics.

Our teaching is underpinned by research in six core themes:

• Biomaterials and tissue engineering
• Ceramics and glasses
• Engineering and alloys
• Functional materials
• Nanotechnology and nanoscale characterisation
• Theory and simulation of materials

Our research is enriched by strong interdepartmental collaboration, in particular with Bioengineering, Physics, Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering, and access to a wide range of first-class facilities for processing and characterising materials.

The Department of Mathematics is one of the strongest and most active in the UK.

We're also one of the largest, with 1000 undergraduates undertaking a broad range of BSc and MSci courses, 200 MSc students and 200 PhD students.

Our teaching staff comprises 100 academic staff (including 46 Professors), some 81 Research Associates/Fellows, and a steady flow of international visitors. We also have strong links with external organisations, especially with the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries, the government statistical service, retail and investment banking, and the hedge fund sector.

The principal aim of the Department is to train professional mathematicians to pursue the study of scientific and technological problems by mathematical methods, and to undertake research. Our research is organised into four sections:

• Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics (including Numerical Analysis)
• Mathematical Finance
• Pure Mathematics
• Statistics

These sections support our extensive PhD programme, as well as helping us to keep our MSc courses at the cutting edge of the field.

Imperial has one of the largest and most advanced mechanical engineering departments in the world.

It has a long-standing and well-established international reputation for the quality of its research, which is organised into three divisions:

• applied mechanics
• mechanics of materials
• thermofluids

The Department is one of the most successful in gaining funds for research from government, industry and charities. Much of our research is conducted in collaboration with industry, government establishments and other universities, both in the UK and worldwide.

Creating work that’s useful and has a practical application is our main aim, which is why we have forged close relationships with a range of industries, from those involved in the development of aircraft engines to human knee joints. It is this focus that keeps us motivated to produce new inventions, which have led to the creation of a number of patents and spin out companies through Imperial's technology transfer company, Imperial Innovations.

The Department receives sponsorship from major businesses and organisations such as Airbus, AWE, BASF, British Energy, BP Global Fuels, EDF, EPSRC, Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls-Royce, Scania, Serco, SKF, and the Wellcome Trust.

The Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London aims to equip students with the latest skills and techniques to bring benefits to patients and populations.

Our wide range of advanced postgraduate programmes are aligned with world-leading biomedical and healthcare research, and will immerse you in a culture of discovery and clinical translation.

The Faculty's wide-ranging postgraduate programmes and doctoral training will immerse you in world-leading scientific discovery and its translation to public health improvements.

Our students benefit from our close connections with healthcare partners and multidisciplinary collaborations with the College's Faculties of Engineering, Natural Sciences and the Imperial College Business School. The combination of outstanding science, excellent staff and innovative teaching methods results in a truly world-class study experience.

Imperial’s Department of Physics is one of the largest and most prestigious in the UK.

We have 150 academic staff, over 200 postdoctoral students, 900 undergraduate and 500 postgraduate students. The Department has hosted three Nobel Prize winners in the past, and is currently home to three Knights of the Realm:

• Sir Peter Knight
• Sir John Pendry
• Sir Jim Virdee

We're also home to 16 Fellows of the Royal Society, including Professors Michele Dougherty, Joanna Haigh and Jenny Nelson.

Research within the Department is carried out by nine research groups:

• Astrophysics
• Condensed Matter Theory
• Experimental Solid State Physics
• High Energy Physics
• Photonics
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Optics and Laser Science
• Space and Atmospheric Physics
• Theoretical Physics

The Science Communication Unit offers MSc courses in Science Communication and Science Media Production, both of which were the first of their kind in Europe.

These courses provide a balanced technical and theoretical training, and prepare science, engineering and medical graduates for communication careers in the media, public relations, museums and government.

Graduates from these courses find employment in a range of media outlets, including New Scientist magazine, the Science Museum and the BBC, as well as in policy positions within government, and in communications departments within scientific organisations, in museums and science centres, and in campaign groups and research charities.

Our Master's courses are underpinned by the activities of our Science Communication Research Group, whose work spans both academic research and professional media practice. The Unit also organises the Science Communication Forum, which promotes debate about science and science communication across the College.